A giant playground for giant kids?

In an age, where financial wizards, bankers and business persons are called “players” or even “global players”, top manager or market-leading companies “key-players”, and an almost bankrupt company “is suddenly back in the game”, one is inclined to speculate about the origin of these voguish words. The latest coinages are “theatre” to describe the battlefields in Afghanistan, and “decompression time” – just like after a pleasurable dive in some exotic place – to explain the short time soldiers spent between a season (in keeping with the idea of leisure time) in a “theatre” to chill out before returning to their home countries.

What may be the causes of these ever-present and verifiable symptoms? Playing computer games indiscriminately may be one. Excessive game playing in language education and often, as a result of this, a lack of seriousness may be another. But in what way may other educational tools such as computer software, which all too often appears to be still in its beta-stage, with error messages popping up most of the time, generally contribute to fostering a rather lax attitude? In what way does this affect the pliable minds of the young when they grow up with imperfect hard and software? Do these mistakes, errors, flaws, faults or whatever we may chooses to call them, take on a different meaning and we come regard them as natural, unavoidable occurrences? And how does an all too easy-going attitude generally impair our ability to predict, analyse and pre-empt problems? How do games in language teaching mould the characters of learners or students? How does a generation fare when it has grown up with computer games and lots of “gaming experience” in and outside the classroom when they enter the job market?

Developmental and educational games in foreign language education
How effective are they? That would obviously depend on the sort of questions one is prepared to ask. My criteria have not changed over the years:
How much time is spent on playing games? What do I get out of them in terms of quantity and quality? How many contextual phrases and other meaningful, contextual fragments, and synonymous expressions etc. have become part of my active vocabulary? And, if no hand-outs are provided, have I had a chance to copy down those words, phrases or fragments or even entire interesting sentences for future reference to work with at home in my own time instead of relying solely on the elusive spoken word in class?

One of the most useless games in language learning I have ever taken part in was about 25 years ago. What was the point of cutting up a newspaper article, distributing the clippings to the students, making them read out the snippets and having them put the newspaper article in its original sequence? Not one single new word was discussed and not one single definition was given from this difficult and otherwise suitable article from London Times. And what bearing has this sort of exercise on the acquisition of a foreign language, of what goes on in our minds when we want to increase our vocabulary? I would expect to find this sort of game in an assessment centre to test participants for characteristics like leadership qualities or their ability to fall into line in a hierarchical set-up but not in a language class. Incidentally, none of the participants complained about this novel idea of doing vocabulary work and I am not sure how many were aware of this and preferred to suffer in silence.

Another high-light was when a native speaker of English handed out about 15 idioms, in this case pertaining to one group – duly cut up –, asking the class to match the definitions with the idioms. No hand-outs were given to us and I had to hurry to copy down those three idioms I did not know. What a waste of precious 45 minutes! I almost forgot to mention the fact that students were supposed to discuss their viewpoints among themselves with the “supervisor”, or rather animator, exercising utmost restraint all the time. I was under the impression the supervisor was having a good time in abiding by the rules of a theoretical model.

In order to give students an opportunity to pass away the time in the class room, text book publishers changed the format of many text books and made them unnecessarily larger, catering for a need learners did not know they had: full-colour editions of text-books with lots of empty space to scribble onto. Although the latter can be fun, too, especially when you are the ambitious type and design your own Rorschach tests. I guess that the print normally used in, for instance pocket-book sized text books, would make them balk at reading altogether, or in other words, it would remind them of „serious work or study”, which seems not the fashionable thing to do and above all, do not hold any promises of “fun”. It is no surprise to see these books with cartoons in adult education and I wonder, how many trees could have been saved in the past 30 years.

One result of “creative” games may be that games help to make anything which is uttered “ingrained”. Yet, little control of “quality input” is exercised due to the nature of games. Evermore games are invented as if the novelty factor were the decisive criterion. One sometimes gets the idea that there is a never-ending competition of inventing ever new games going on among educators while the number of games really useful have long been exhausted. A native-speaker friend of mine who had worked as a teacher of English in Hannover for several years told me that weekend seminars for teachers were held on the North Sea coast for the sole purpose of learning new games for use in the classroom. It must have been great fun for the participants, adult-sized-kids as it were. One has to concede, however, that useful games may have their place in pre-school education.

Only recently, an acquaintance of mine who has no formal teacher’s training told me that he had volunteered to host a discussion group for migrants. The fun-factor was important, he had been given to understand. And the most important thing was to just make the participants talk without talking too much himself, he told me with a smile of resignation. He had been admonished not to interfere in the free flow of ideas exchanged among the participants only to find that his charges conversed in a mutilated, difficult, hard to follow and often incomprehensible Pidgin sort of German. As a result, he sat there all the while, nodding off the gibberish emitted from eager, yet incompetent mouths. They did not know otherwise.

No wonder that he threw in the towel out of frustration after about four weeks. It was simply beyond him why it was perfectly acceptable to subject learners to bad language, to bad model-sentences, to bad snatches of speech, to bad pronunciation, to bad collocation, to very bad grammar and to an extremely poor vocabulary and style. In fact, so bad, no parents would subject their children to it, if there native-tongue were concerned. And he concluded that, up to a certain level, one would probably find this in almost any classroom you might care to visit. I hasten to add that “bad” is used here, of course, in a sense of “a strain on the interlocutors, hard to follow, difficult or even impossible to understand.”

As we have seen, playing games and other modern methods can be fun for the learner and be the source of great hilarity to the critical observer. It would be remiss of me not to mention one incident when native-speaker text book authors wanted to have some fun too. On a work-sheet containing idioms and colloquial expressions to be imparted to eager students, wanting to learn idiomatic or natural English, it said with great pedagogic conviction: “You may sound odd if you use them”. Printed by the publisher, mind you, not a hand-written note by some disillusioned teacher. Not a word of criticism was heard at such balderdash. I, however, presumed to disagree, suggesting that it was not a very encouraging remark to put on worksheets to be distributed to students of English, especially not since the copy was taken from a text book published in England.

You would expect this sort of comment in support material for Basic Global English, which is, according to its inventor Dr. Joachim Grzega, not suitable for communication with native speakers of English. Generally, learners think that UK and US English is taught here in Germany throughout and many pupils and students would be very disappointed to learn if “Basic Global English” and its somewhat older relation “Globish” were introduced on the sly through the back door.

“Use your own words”, said in a minatory voice, as if it were an offence to use newly acquired vocabulary is another rule straight from “The Book”. Using ones` own words must be more fun, I concluded, because of the implicit “seriousness” (equals absence of fun) inherent in building up a large diction. By implication this rather arrogant instruction means: don’t take the trouble to employ those words you might have just learned, if I had not prevented it, that is, do not enlarge your vocabulary, do not increase your power of thinking.” It is common knowledge that every single word is a tool to do your thinking with, the more tools you have at your disposal the more powerful your thinking will become. Conversely, reducing and limiting one’s vocabulary would be a retrograde evolutionary step.

The following example is about a foreigner who made other peoples` words his own and who did seem to get a certain degree of fun out of it. When I was about 14 years old, I met one of the so-called “guest-workers”. He was Italian and must have been about 40 years old. Apart from his open-minded relations with Germans, which was very unusual at the time, I was struck by his excellent German. He spoke with great precision, had a large vocabulary, impeccable grammar (hold your horses, I know what you are thinking) – that is, qualities contributing to clarity. In the course of our talk, he pulled a notepad and pen out of his pocket and asked me about the meaning and spelling of a word I had just used. He then wrote the word into his notepad with great precision and care. Oddly enough, it did seem like “fun” to him and I asked him, what else he did to improve his excellent German. “It’s great fun listening to the radio. I like reading newspapers as well, not the tabloids, though”, he told me with great conviction.

As to the taboo word grammar, I once met a German who was a very fluent, a fast talker with a large vocabulary. All the while he was churning out his words, he seemed to have great fun. But not those interlocutors of his who took an interest in what he was saying and did not just nod him off in the right places without understanding much. My complaint may not be politically correct but listening to him was a terrible strain because he made so many grammatical mistakes that they were actually an obstacle to comprehending what he was trying to say. According to the doctrines of the modern pedagogy, he must have been a one-off because “The book” says that with time and practice, mistakes will disappear. With him, they had become ingrained – a fact that is frequently overlooked. Now I dare ask a bold question: if you say something grammatical wrong over and over again, how can it ever become right?

To most questions posed at the outset of this post, I can offer no answers. And those I offer, tentative as they may be, probably fall short of general approval. The moderate use of games in the classroom can be useful, especially as a break from long hours of learning. However, in most cases games are time-consuming and yield little measurable results. As to the problem of how a game-playing “culture” may affect society on a wider scale in terms of its brainpower and economic performance, ex-chancellor Kohl put the dilemma very succinctly about fifteen years ago:
“Germany is a huge amusement park”.
One is inclined to add now: operated by professional teenagers.

About this posting

Finally, it would be interesting to see the first book written in Basic Global English, Dr. Joachim Grzega`s novel and daring invention and see in which section bookshops will display such a work of art.

Group work at universities: a peremptory demand by industry and commerce

In 1982, when I was a guest reader at Hannover University, I was struck by the so-called “group work”. The way it was done did not make any sense to me. The answer to this riddle I got straight from the horse’s mouth, when I asked a native-speaker lecturer about it. She had been a witness of the times, saying that industry and commerce had asked all universities to implement group work in order to better prepare students for their future jobs. The curricula in all disciplines were obligingly changed in a rush and no-one has ever bothered to look at the way group work is actually done.

Putting the cat among the pigeons, I will start my discussion with a rather contradictory sentence I found a few years ago in the classified ad section of a broad sheet newspaper:

“Employees of the sales department have the opportunity to prove themselves on their own in a highly competitive market while aware that success can only be achieved as a team.”

I must confess I am guilty of palliating the rather harsh sounding German original, which is:
“As employee of … you are an individual fighter in a highly competitive market…”

This statement reflects the whole fundamental dilemma of “group work” as it has been practiced in preparation for occupational and professional careers all over the world in schools and universities for more than 30 years. However, in the mid-seventies – shortly after the implementation of group work in schools and universities, a devastating study was published in the “Harvard Business Review” by two scientists, purporting that in the business world or in management starting at supervisory level, hardly any work was done in groups in the way it was practiced in schools and universities.

The most striking difference between theory and practice is that at schools and universities, groups are peer groups, that is, group members forming a group are all of the same rank, trying to solve problems in a “democratic” way. Interminable discussions often go on in round-about ways about incidental issues. In foreign language classes, error-swapping becomes the most notable of all activities. None of the group members has the formal authority to assign tasks, follow up on them, discipline laggards, and evaluate the individual group member’s contribution to the project work. The role of the professor or teacher is in most cases reduced to handing out the task to the group and making sure that only the target language is spoken throughout with some of these teachers engaging in the latter with a kind of pathetic rigour. The group will then divide the task and sort out the details among themselves without further follow-ups or close supervision by the professor or teacher, giving spongers ample opportunities to reap the benefit of the groups` achievement without ever doing a single stroke of work at home. Conversely, in class, some basic grasp of core issues and key phrases enable them to pass themselves off as diligent and expert students on the subject without the professor ever noticing.

Group work is often used in assessing leadership potential of participants or their ability to get along with people in assessment centres where it has its justified due place. However, in the day to day operation of companies, subordination rather than creative contributions is more likely to be expected from the individual group members or staff.

Apart from this, in the real world, there is always a manager or department head in charge whenever he or she calls a meeting for any purpose. This superior head of department has the formal authority to give direction if not plain orders. Subordinate group members, to use this term for the sake of comparison, have a predefined area of work for which they have been hired and are solely responsible for. Tasks are assigned by unconcealed instructions by the group member of the highest rank and not by discussing endlessly who is going to do what and how it should be done. Every single subordinate group member has to rely on him- or herself when it comes to accomplishing a particular task with the exception of the odd non-committal peer consulting.

Following-up on assigned tasks, controlling, and final evaluation of the individual group member’s contribution is done by the manager by virtue of his formal authority he has been invested with. He ensures that only the individual is finally held responsible for the quality of any work assigned to him or her rather than punish the group summarily for the poor performance of one or two underachievers. Conversely, high achievers do not need to share their success with those who do not merit it.

I think that it was rather the communication skills managerial and supervisory staff need in meetings which had been mistakenly dubbed “group-work” way back in the seventies. To me it is not surprising that no one ever seems to have questioned “procedures”. Maybe it is to do with the “authority-syndrome” and I cannot help thinking of Dr. Fox, the actor who had been hired to deliver speeches which did not make any sense without anyone noticing.

Today, you find group work in both schools and university across the board in all disciplines. Not surprisingly, also in foreign languages. It is the mainstay of the Communicative Teaching Method or CTM is group work and plays an important part in Dr. Joachim Grzega`s artificial and mutilated invention, namely his Basic Global English method. For the past three decades, almost everything is done in groups, be that discussions, joint writing of texts of any kind or communal text appreciation; cooperative poetry analysis or collective grammar and vocabulary exercises. What the heck have group-work and the ensuing discussions with non-native speakers of English got to do with the acquisition of a foreign language when there are much better role models and methods around?

There are other downsides to group work, as well. For instance, when doing work in a group that requires your utmost attention, you may get distracted by frequent and often superfluous interruptions or overbearing interferences. Or oneself feels obliged to consult the other members of the group for the sake of asking a question or the opinion of the others just because this is what is expected of you in group work. My observations made over many years seem to confirm my assumptions.

In order to illustrate my arguments, I can give a few examples from the vast storehouse of my experience. The daughter of an acquaintance of mine had been a straight “A” student for four consecutive terms. When she could no longer put off attending university courses which required her to do group work, she was alarmed, fearing that her good performance might be tarnished by a mediocre “B” grade the group might receive for the plain fact that spongers, less interested and also average students might bring down her impressive performance. Fortunately, it did not turn out that way in this instance, but the following example is a convincing case in which a teacher was unable to judge the individual group members` performances because most preparatory work had to be done at home.

I remember a case when a professor made some deprecating remarks about one of our group members. She wrongly assumed that the student in question had hardly done any work while in fact the student was the key player in that she had prepared all the nitty-gritty work of research and summarized her findings expertly and handed them to two spongers on a platter. If I had not had the chance to point out that it was in fact that very student who contributed to the group’s success the most, the student’s final evaluation would most likely have been downgraded because of this mistaken perception on the part of the teacher. Go-to guys sometimes remain behind the scenes out of modesty, as in this case, which can lead to devastating assessments by professors and teachers. Oral activity in the classroom is not necessarily an indicator of a group member’s true contribution to the work of the entire group.

Another example is the case of a group of about ten people, which had been formed impromptu during a literature class at university. One student was to hold a short lecture on the outcome of our discussion on a set of questions, which proved to be a sort of “mission impossible”. Nevertheless, no-one realized this. The student in question was to take minutes of the individual contributions to the group discussion while guiding the group through a set of questions. Then, she was to analyse her minutes for a couple of minutes before presenting the consensus ideas to the whole class. No one realized that she presented her own ideas prepared in some detail at home against said set of questions.

During the group discussion, she would steam-roll across all ideas which deviated from those she had prepared. After a couple of minutes of refreshing her memory, she read her notes off three closely written pages – those notes she had entirely prepared at home. None of the arguments put forward during the group discussion by participants – some of these differed widely from hers – was mentioned in her oral summary to the entire class. Since ideas on literature tend to be highly subjective, no-one actually realized that the excellent lecture she delivered was solely her work, her very own analysis. If someone else noticed what she had actually done, he or she kept quiet with the professor beaming as she had gone by “The Book” and “made the group talk”. You cannot blame the student who delivered the lecture, resolute as it was. If your marks or evaluation were dependent on this “sort” of group work, would you have done otherwise?

Peer editing is another common group activity although in this case it is done on a smaller scale, namely in pairs. There is no denying that your non-native editor may spot the odd awkward passage or the odd mistake. But in most cases, he or she may not be very helpful in remedying fundamental short-comings. Rather, error swapping among the non-native participants is more common. If the students are lucky, a native speaker teacher checks and prepares the text so that it can be saved on your “brain-hard-disk-drive”.

Generally speaking, there is a dangerous implication in the failure to recommend native-speaker editing in that language students are made to believe that their English is a native-speaker-like UK or US English and does not need editing.

To revert to the two distinguished scientists who had established that group work did not actually happen in companies in the same way it was done in the classroom: their finding did not surprise me at all. It coincided with my experience that the only time two or more heads of department ever worked together on a joint project on equal footing was when it came to organising the annual Christmas binge party.

Come to think of it: What might Sigmund Freud have said about the educators` preoccupation with “group work”? I would not be surprised if he had diagnosed “group work” as a sort of sublimation, the sort you would think he might be interested in.

There is no trick to being a satirist when you have so many people working for you.

About this posting

Finally, it would be interesting to see the first book written in Basic Global English, Dr. Joachim Grzega`s novel and daring invention and see in which section bookshops will display such a work of art.

Advertising Copywriters and other Role Models in Language Teaching and Training

Beware: Satire

The other day, I noticed a new advertising campaign by a German airline. Linguistically genetically engineered, or rather maimed adjectives like the ones in the blog title were paraded on posters, which were strategically placed in Hanover’s underground stations and along major roads. Each poster featured a different bastardized, distorted and degenerated adjective in German which was positioned on top of a photograph of a smiling air hostess. I took the liberty of adapting them when I wrote this spoof and needed to come up with their equivalents in English. However, I managed to retain the intended “play” on the last syllables.

On the following day, about at the same time, I noticed a small group of migrants. This is what we call the people pertaining to this group because we do not have immigrants in Germany. They had assembled before one of these posters and were looking reverently upwards at this novel aberration of our language.

Then, the most astonishing thing happened. One of the girls stepped forward, turned around towards her group and began to recite rhythmically the subject matter of their admiration, clapping her hands as if to underline each syllable. All the time, she moved about like a cheerleader, while enunciating each syllable of the adjective of their choice with great precision and no small degree of enthusiasm. WRONG-ER-ER-ER, WRONG-ER-ER-ER, WRONG-ER-ER-ER, the group chimed in, chanting ecstatically with enraptured eyes.

The entire situation somehow reminded me of elocution classes pegged down a few notches. And at the same time, I was thinking of Dr. Joachim Grzega`s novel and daring concept of Basic Global English. Mr Grzega is a German linguist with a mission in that he has, like his copywriting advertising colleagues, maimed and mutilated a language, though in his case it is Standard English – a language which is not his native tongue. His novel and courageous invention is a Simplified-Simple-Speak version of the “Local English, German Version or German Chapter”.

What is most admirable is the fact that Dr. Grzega has boldly reduced Standard English grammar to 20 rules. He did not even bother to ask native speakers of English – the rightful owners of Standard English – whether a non-native speaker of English should be allowed to tamper with one of the most subtle languages of Europe, which has proven to be a tried and tested code of communication. His Basic Global English consists of a vocabulary of some 750 word and a bonus bespoke vocabulary of 250 words, tailored to the individual needs of his pupils. Dr. Grzega reckons that this Simplified-Simple-Speak vocabulary is good enough to explain our present day complex world with. And the perhaps teeny-weeny individual worlds of his learners with the help of the tailor-made 250-word bonus vocabulary. The only good news is that the adjectives used in the caption of this spoof are on his pitiful vocabulary list of 750 words which “BGE speakers” should know. Consequently, learners of Basic Global English and Basic Global Business English will at least be able to read the caption of this blog.

To revert to my small group of enthusiasts, I could not find fault with all this. They were just acting true to fashion. To them, it was good or correct German worthy of becoming part of their active vocabulary. After six months of intensive hypnopaedia – I am being awfully sarcastic here – in a free language course which migrants of German descent receive upon arrival in Germany and after passing a language test prior to being given a visa, many of these migrants can barely bid you good morning in German after completion of said course. A Polish colleague told me ten years ago that at most language schools, learners are advised not to study the language of their new home country but pick up the language “naturally”. This holds also true for present-day languages classes for migrants. If they come across a new word they do not know, they are advised not to consult dictionaries. With time, they will know, they are told. Many migrants I have asked ever since have confirmed this. By implication it means: don’t take the trouble to learn new words; do not enlarge your vocabulary; do not increase your power of thinking.

You are also likely to encounter the all too complacent advice by teachers “Do not worry if you don’t understand a word”, the implication being to take it easy, not to bother to look up words in a dictionary or even dictionaries, not to study how words and phrases operate in their contexts. Try telling that to your young children when they ask you about the meaning of a word when they begin to learn their native tongue. No one would ever dream of doing this. Why is it done when it comes to teaching a foreign language? Has nobody ever realized how incongruous or indeed absurd this instruction is?

In foreign language teaching you may even come across a native speaker of English giving learners expert advice like, for instance, not to bother looking up words but to pick up the language “naturally” without their ever having learnt a foreign language themselves. Likewise, they may never bother to teach words and phrases in a context. “Teaching English in contexts is considered time consuming in pedagogy”, a young teacher-student said in a lecture only two years ago. That is why you still find learners learning single words by heart, perhaps with one sentence to illustrate their meaning. It must be the same method used by Neolithic men when they were building up their vocabulary by looking at cave paintings and learning the animals` names by rote. But one needs more sentences or parts of them to anchor words in the memory, become more fluent and acquire a good grasp of any given language.

As a result, we have migrants living here “abroad” for a decade or two and they still do not know any German at all. Others have a working vocabulary of about 700 words or so and talking to them is a strain on anyone who takes a genuine interest in what is being said. If not and you just nod them off out of politeness, you are behaving “politically correct” but without the slightest genuine exchange of ideas. Is it any wonder that migrants are not fully integrated in our society?

You may even find many migrants who have lived here for 10 or even 20 years and who can barely speak the language but are, nevertheless in a state of blissful incompetence, believing that they do speak the language. Despite the fact that many of them have German colleagues at work and German friends, they have not improved their German one little bit. Watching TV regularly, but passively seems no solution either for most of them. I think it is high time that the fairy tale that one learns a language best by living in the country were put under close scrutiny. This myth will then probably be in tatters: living in a foreign country without getting involved in the language in one way or other does not guarantee success. People who can pick up a language only by ear and do not even need a native speaker spouse or friend they can consult on grammar and the meaning of words are as rare as chess-grandmasters, but the latter have to work very hard and train every day for hours on end in addition to being extremely talented.

Basically, living in the country of one’s choice, together with a multitude of learning aids, provides ample opportunities to learn a language. It would be interesting to find out why most people, migrants and learners of a foreign language alike, manage to communicate only at the “threshold level”. It is small wonder that too many migrants have difficulty in entering the “house” or, in other words, become integrated in society. Very little is known about how “very good” students learn a foreign language. Some of those who managed to acquire good language skills, be it when they lived abroad or in their country of origin, do not talk about it, but from my experience and modest “research”, I can say that most truly advanced students did, in one way or the other, work for it.

Almost 25 years ago there was a passage in a brochure issued by the either Ministry of Education or the Ministry of Science and Technology, I cannot recall exactly which, about prize-winning pupils in the annual foreign languages competition. It innocently stated that nothing at all was known about how those pupils learned their foreign languages, only one thing was certain: not in school. Looking at the latest PISA results, we may deduce that for some reason or other this state of “ignorance” has been perpetuated.

Way back in 1982, I took part in a conversation in which a friend of a friend claimed that he knew someone at a Regional Government Office whose job it was to convert A-Level results to those of 1953 and that a straight “A” achieved in 1982 was a humble “C” in 1953. Not surprisingly, standards have deteriorated further in the intervening 27 years and it would be interesting to know, what an “A” achieved in 2009 is really worth these days. Can one not infer that the poor PISA results German pupils scored did not come as a surprise to the authorities and why corrective action was not taken in time? In my opinion, it was easier to acquiesce in the situation brought about by the unconstrained application of the doctrines of a liberal and permissive society, rather than try to apply higher standards against the opposition of minority groups.

To answer my question in the caption of this satire, whether admen, or more politically correct, adpersons serve as role models in language learning: the answer is a resounding no. However, at least one creative mind of our nation’s best minds – so they say – must feel very proud now. Allegedly, the best psychologists work in PR, marketing and advertising. Had I not known, I would never have guessed. Perhaps the perpetrator of this linguistic crime will be nominated for the next “Advertising Oscar”, which ad people award each other at their annual binge.

There is no trick to being a satirist when you have so many people working for you.

About this posting

Finally, it would be interesting to see the first book written in Basic Global English, Dr. Joachim Grzega`s novel and daring invention and see in which section bookshops will display such a work of art.

How do benign teaching methods contribute to learning a foreign language?
Reliance on the elusive spoken word, time-consuming games and teaching techniques peculiar to animators, group discussions unchecked for appropriateness, precision, and clarity, unbridled disregard of error-swapping in peer-editing and group discussions: To come up with a scheme to remedy the current sorry state, a rigorous analysis of what is going on at the receiving end in the teaching process, for instance, recording and analysing classroom activities, may be useful in reassessing the unhappy status quo.

How a failure in communication changed my life

With tongue in cheek, I relish telling this little anecdote about the origin of CTM or Communicative Teaching Method, which has been dogmatically and uncritically applied in teaching foreign languages ever since. I was a contemporary witness when a paradigm change took place and social work was implemented in pedagogy way back in the seventies. To illustrate my point, this is when I became aware of it.
Scottish Peter, as he was nicknamed, was standing before me, bent over with his hands supporting his massive body on his knees. He was swaying from side to side, alternatingly directing first his left ear and then his right ear into the direction of my mouth. All the time, he had a look of utter despair on his face, his eyes fixed onto my lips as if this were to facilitate his comprehension of what I was trying to say. Alas, it was to no avail.

I was trying to pronounce the word “vegetable”, but I must have gotten the IP alphabet symbols wrong when I taught myself some of the rudimentary things about the English language. Not unexpectedly, there were bound to be errors and in this case my pronunciation of the second syllable sounded like “table”, vege-table. No wonder Scottish Peter, who worked as a breakfast and vegetable cook in our small hotel in Guernsey for the summer season, had a hard time understanding me. And being a social worker by profession, he felt it his duty to blame himself for what he thought was his inability to understand my gibberish sort of language, rather than blaming my ignorance and inability to speak understandable, accurate and clear English. But can you actually blame him? He was probably the victim of the theory of CTM, which has, up to now, not been scientifically tested. He was probably thinking all the time when our little communicative comical act was going on that I was an underprivileged victim of society. It never crossed his mind that I might have been just too lazy to learn proper Standard English! Needless to say that this break-down in communication was no isolated incident and I resolved to do something about it to ensure I would always be understood with ease, if that should ever be possible.

At the time, I had little theoretical grounding on phonetics and grammar worth mentioning. My active vocabulary was about 700 words barely enough to engage in simple-speak-small-talk. English people are always polite and tried to make me believe that my English was good, which I knew was not. After my first stay in the UK, I began to work in earnest with authentic material to improve my English in all areas. In short, I began to “study” proper English largely on my own. It was common practice at the time that the native teachers did most of the talking, which suited me well since I was very much interested in “authentic English” and in most cases, I absorbed this as first rate model English like a sponge.

It was the time, when the responsibility for results to be achieved in language- teaching rested solely with the teacher. He was supposed to impart his or her knowledge of his or her language, his or her expertise on synonyms, near synonyms and varied structures, giving many contextual examples. And all of this was done skilfully, professionally and competently with a high degree of enthusiasm, fervour and zeal. I have it on good authority straight from the horse’s mouth that these days, teaching contextual English is considered “time-consuming”. They always handed out copies of the texts so that one was able to work with them at home in one’s own time and do the all-important revisions whenever one wanted to. Some of them had used their teaching material for more than twenty years without detriment to the motivation of their students. With this way of presenting material, I found that the retention rate was high, probably because of the affective element inherent in this teaching technique. Out of about fifteen teachers of English I have had, about four actually possessed those rare qualities. This high-calibre and talented kind of person was appreciated unanimously by all students, even the slow and lazy ones. What was mostly valued by most of us was his or her ability to give explanations eloquently and fit for printing, in short, he and she was a master of his or her language.

Then, there was a major change in teaching of foreign languages. I vividly remember the evening when I had my first encounter with the “Communicative Teaching Method” or CTM, as it was called. It was in one of those language classes for immigrants in South Africa. I had attended the language course for immigrants before and was surprised that we were about 80 people in the class on that evening as opposed to some 20 in previous classes. The new teacher divided the class into groups of four with the air of an expert as if he had had long years of practice in what was to follow. He then went around the class talking briefly to each group. Our group was the last he stopped by and after exchanging a few sentences with each of us he established that our group happened to be the most advanced group in the room. Since I was not interested in statistics and swapping errors with other non-native speakers of English, I stopped going to that class.

Only years later did I find out that the CTM had been introduced worldwide without any shred of scientific evidence as to its efficacy. And I have not seen any comparative long-term scientific studies of any given method combination!

But this was not my last contact with my pedagogic pet peeve. A university lecturer at Hannover University, who had read German at some American university, had been in the country for a number of years, cohabiting with a German woman for some time. Yet, he was unable to speak German; it was rather the gibberish sort – despite all the advantages of living with an educated native speaker, which is particularly conducive to acquiring a foreign tongue.

And he did insist on going by the CTM “Book” in his classes. One day he called to tell me that he had been most astonished to have found more than ninety students in his class at his university course on Shakespeare, and was eager and proud to explain that he had gone by “The Book” by having the students form groups of four and speak to one another in English. All he did was go round, ensuring that only English was spoken, while making sure he did not miss a single table of four.

I suppose that in the not too distant future this sort of hopping from group to group and “listening in” can be taken over by some language-surveillance computer or robot. This device would hover above the participants, the symbolic meaning of hovering being the authority or superior knowledge so badly craved for, ignore the quality of English spoken, emit some encouraging sounds at irregular intervals, tilt its metal head as a sign of attention, extend a pair of metal ears, duly pricked-up – and it could even be programmed to make some nodding movement, indicating approval – and it would not have to be in the right places because nobody would notice or care.

Needless to say that it is S.O.P. (Standard Operating Procedure) with CTM not to interfere, not to correct even bad mistakes and above all, to leave the talking to the group: “active speaking” right from the start. In other words: output without input.

Incidentally, the expression “active speaking” is part of a slogan used by a coaching company in Germany. Ever since I read their ad, I have been wondering what “passive speaking” may be like. “Silence” would be my best guess, also because it is what would be best these days in many cases.

There is no trick to being a satirist if you have so many people working for you.

Finally, it would be interesting to see the first book written in Basic Global English, Dr. Joachim Grzega`s novel and daring invention and see in which section bookshops will display such a work of art

Can El Silbo, the whistling language of the Canaries, become a serious contender to Basic Global English or even Standard English?

Beware: Satire

Are you fed up with hearing grunting noises, expletives, ever more babble and prattle, bellowing and yelling? Are you sick and tired of listening to Local Englishes, the maimed and substandard forms of Standard English? Have you had enough of conversing in Basic Global English, which is Dr. Joachim Grzega`s mutilated and novel form of Local English? Then, El Silbo, the harmonious whistling language of Gomera with its warbling and trilling, tweeting and cheeping sounds may appeal to you.

The whistling language El Silbo enables people to communicate across the many deep valleys of the volcanic island of Gomera. This set me thinking and I have been wondering why could it not be used to bridge the gap between Standard English and its new expanded Pidgin English varieties. In my humble opinion, it is well suited to become the lowest common denominator like Globish or Basic Global English. El Silbo seems somewhat superior to some of the newer forms of Neo Pidgin English or Local Englishes in the making.

El Silbo has no syntax or grammar of its own. It is a sign language, like Morse code or some rudimentary form of Neo-Pidgin English. The language has four vowels and four consonants which can be whistled in rising or falling pitches to form some 4,000 words. Although some say this restricts conversation, expert whistlers maintain that if you can say it, you can whistle it. Messages must be whistled with rhythm, clarity and power, which makes El Silbo far superior to Dr. Grzega`s novel and daring Basic Global English, which distinguishes itself by its paucity of diction with its basic vocabulary of 750 words and a bonus vocabulary of 250 to describe the speakers` individual worlds with.

While you can see locals in the sunny island of Gomera, gazing out to sea and puckering up to perform their “Silbo” whistling language, I have already reconciled myself to facing the next wave of language deterioration, which is sure to happen with the unrelenting advance of substandard language in the media, the internet and books.

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Finally, it would be interesting to see the first book written in Basic Global English, Dr. Joachim Grzega`s novel and daring invention and see in which section bookshops will display such a work of art.

BGE (Global Basic English), Globbish, Simple-Speak, Simplified-Simple-Speak – What you may always have wanted to know about Neo-pidginicity!

Neo-pidginicity is the artificially accelerated and manipulated process – or rather linguistic genetic engineering – of attempting to oversimplify Standard English, the result of which is in all cases some sort of neo-pidgin English. Four mainstream deviations of Standard English contribute to the gradual encroachment of neo-pidgin English on Standard English:

1. Teaching BGE or Basic Global English as advocated by Dr. Joachim Grzega is the most infamous approach to pandering to those unwilling to learn Standard English is. It is a teaching programme of his own invention and it has been painstakingly constructed to accelerate the acquisition of a mutilated sort of English. But also school-English is a widespread contributor to spreading the unnatural and often mutilated “local Englishes”. Non-native speakers of English often teach their respective version of “Local English”. The result of the English “produced” in all these areas of contact is often, at best, a barely elevated Pidgin English.

2. Unedited documents and publications – frequently of international validity – are passed off as standard English but in fact they were written by non-native speakers of English often in a substandard, mutilated, and therefore difficult English.

3. The unreflecting acceptance of “local Englishes” as they grow rampant in their respective countries is a major factor, too. Local Englishes are pushing their way into societies violently and unnaturally fast with all their excrescencies.

4. Machine translated websites, documents, and correspondence more often than not leave you guessing, and so does translation software for your home computer.

Both pidgin English and neo-pidgin English have a few features in common which are often either ignored or considered taboo: both varieties are frequently broken and unnatural English and, therefore, difficult to understand, often ambiguous and leave the conversationalist guessing in many instances. As a rule, the average standard of a speech in Pidgin English is usually in the region of 4th graders, of which many proponents of Pidgin varieties are probably unaware.
The most prominent propounders and popularizers of BGE or Basic Global English, the poor deviant of standard English, are non-native speakers of English. It is their mission to create an artificial sort of official global language – a kind of “Simplified Simple-Speak” even simpler than the elusive and still to be created Globbish. And BGE is considered suitable to serve as a lingua franca at the highest level among bankers, politicians, business persons and other decision makers.

Another striking feature is the fact that the true standard of English in Germany is still a taboo topic and not discussed publicly, although a heated discussion about Denglish is going on. Even in linguistics, the topic of falling standards, especially in schools, is out of bounds. Machine translations are often the cause of great hilarity and although many students of English are aware of this, the impact that machine translations may have seemed to be underestimated.

There is little material available to the public about the influence of all of the above on education, teaching, literature, and society in general. And there is hardly any material on auto didactic learning, informal learning, or self-teaching or self-study as it is sometimes called. The fact that highly successful students are autodidacts is little known too.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Comparative studies analyzing material ranging from papers, essays, homework, records of spoken English etc. to business correspondence, text books, and dissertations would convincingly demonstrate that standards are falling. But such studies are nowhere to be found and if there are any, they are probably not for public consumption. In other words, all my claims could easily be proven by recording, transcribing and analysing spoken language. As to texts, such analysis would even be easier.

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