Page 26 - ELG1707 Jul Issue 449

INTERVIEW .

Inspector

Gadget

ELTons award winner professor Stephen Stephen Bax receiving the
Bax reveals all about his career and his award with Nik Roberts
passion for innovation from Versantus

efore becoming a university professor at the Open building the tool. Teachers can put any text into it and get a quick and
University, you had some interesting and varied detailed insight into the vocabulary content and overall level of their
experiences as a Tefl teacher. Tell us about your career text, for teaching and testing purposes.
Bto date. After a year or so of developing the software myself, I joined up with
I started in Tefl in 1981 when I saw an advert for teachers in Sudan the software development team at Versantus, near Oxford, who helped
saying: ‘Teachers wanted, no experience necessary.’ So from 1981 to me develop the software and interface to a more professional level.
1983 I taught English in a girls’ school in Argo in north Sudan with What has the reception to it been like?
classes of up to 120, and I loved every minute of it, including learning We have had an amazing response. We have had over 120,000 users
Arabic. in the last two years, from 103 countries. It is now used by students and
Then I travelled in the Arab world, studying Arabic in Damascus, staff at 145 universities and colleges. People love it – and they are now
Syria, before going to work for the British asking us if we are going to develop other
Council in Baghdad at the time of the Iran– tools. They’ve asked for more word lists in
Iraq war. The internet and the software and they are asking for more
I then returned to study in the UK, doing checks of grammar.
an MSc at Edinburgh before moving south to digital tools have broken What, do you think, is the
Canterbury, where I now live. potential for such technology to
My PhD is in the cognitive processes down the classroom walls, improve education and ELT?
in reading – researching how people Text Inspector is a good example of
interpret texts. More specifically, I looked at giving learners access how and why English language teaching
intertextuality in reading and discourse, which can be revolutionised by new technologies.
is how people read when there are references to hundreds of new When I started teaching English in Sudan,
to other texts. I have always had an interest in the main focus was on the classroom itself,
texts and text analysis. resources as well as access with a huge burden on the teacher and the
More recently, I have been researching coursework as students had nothing else to
reading using new eye-tracking technology, to other learners around turn to. Now, the internet and digital tools
and received the Tesol Distinguished the world have broken down the classroom walls,
Researcher of the Year Award for 2014 giving learners access to hundreds of new
from the International Tesol Foundation. I resources as well as access to other learners
conducted early research in that area in relation to language testing. around the world. This means that fusty old teachers like me need to
What exactly is your ELTon-winning website textinspector. rethink radically what we do. We might try a flipped classroom or a video
com and why did you decide to develop it? link with a classroom in another continent. In terms of tools for analysis
My interest both in texts and also in technology led me to start like Text Inspector, we can now radically revise our lesson planning, our
strategies for marking and our test preparation.
I would hope that in ten years’ time every English teacher with access
to the internet will automatically check every text they use to ensure
that they are appropriate for testing and teaching.
What does the future hold for textinspector.com?
Then with feedback from users we hope to improve it and make
it even more reliable and useful. Already it can analyse academic
vocabulary in texts but we aim to extend it as a tool for analysing
academic writing even more.
What was it like to win the ELTon award for digital
innovation?
I was really pleased and surprised to receive the ELTon award along
with Versantus. The effect has been a massive boost in the number of
people coming to the site. I now keep the trophy on my mantelpiece.

Prof Bax’s low-tech Stephen Bax is Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics and
start to his career Director of Research Excellence at the School of Languages and Applied
Linguistics at the Open University, UK.
26 July 2017

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