Page 15 - ELG1804 Apr Issue 456

SPECIAL FEATURE

No

more

fairytales

The Gazette’s Iatefl special aims to unravel the myths surrounding English
language teaching, writes Melanie Butler

t Iatefl 2016, Bell’s Silvana Richardson set out to destroy one committee member Philida Schellekens and East London Esol specialist
of the great myths of ELT: that native speakers of English are Jennie Turner explain how, in England, teachers succeed even under a
always better. government which has slashed funding but is seemingly convinced that
A In this Iatefl special feature, the Gazette teams up with foreigners can all learn English easily if only they tried.
conference speakers, Special Interest Group (Sig) representatives and Finally, Mike Milanovic, former chief executive of Cambridge English
EFL specialists to question some more of the unproven assumptions Language Assessment and now adviser to PeopleCert, gives us a
that underpin many of our methodological beliefs. masterclass on the use – and misuse – of computers in the field of testing.
At least three of them date back exactly 140 years ago this year. So there you have it, this Iatefl special feature aims to sort the truth from
In 1878, Maximilian Berlitz hired a young monolingual Frenchman, the fiction and fairy tales.
Nicholas Joly, to teach French at his college in the American state of
Rhode Island. According to the Berlitz corporate website, Maximilian
fell ill for six weeks and when he recovered he found that Joly’s class
‘were engaging in lively question-and-answer exchanges with their
teacher, in elegantly accented French.’
The Direct Method, as it came to be known was, Berlitz argued, a
much better way to learn a language than grammar translation.
On one level, this story represents the early beginnings of
communicative language learning. But it introduces three myths that
still haunt us: that native speakers are always better, that the target
language should always be used in the classroom and that we don’t
need to teach phonology because all students will simply acquire it
effortlessly.
On page 18, the chair of Iatefl Pronunciation Sig Wayne Rimmer,
takes on the myth that learners will pick up ‘elegantly accented’ English
simply by being asked to listen and repeat.
The neuroscience supports him, at least for adult language learners.
As we report on page 19, research in Finland suggests that only
multilingual adults who started learning languages at a young age retain
the ability to perceive and remember foreign sounds. The rest of us do
not even hear them.
Writing on page 20, Harry Kuchah is equally dismissive of the
belief that only the target language should be used in the classroom.
This teacher trainer from Cameroon, now based at the University of
Bath, points out that in large under-resourced classes of multi-lingual
children, the best resource a teacher has is the existing linguistic ability
of the students.
Harry, a plenary speaker at this year’s Young Learners Sig event, also
questions another myth: that children do naturally acquire a language
faster than adults. In his experience this is not true, at least in situations
when their teachers barely speak the language and where the students
are not exposed to it in their community.
John Knagg agrees. In an interview with the Gazette on page 23,
the global head for English in education systems at the British Council
explains his concerns about the global trend towards the teaching of
English to ever younger learners. Terry Phillips takes on a flurry of myths
about using graded readers with young learners on page 24. Esol Sig

editorial@elgazette.com 15

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