Page 4 - ELG1906 May-Jun Issue 465

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EDITORS’ LETTER
Making sense of student progress
EFL needs to start improving outcomes and multisensory
methods may help, say Melanie Butler and Ron Ragsdale
It’s time the EFL industry came to its senses. People are paying good money to learn English and the theteam
quicker they lea rn it, the better.
were told that the single most important factor in the continuing success of the local industry lies in MELANIE BUTLER,
Not that you’d know it. At a recent meeting of British language centre association English UK, we
editor-in-chief,
started teaching EFL
ensuring ‘a great student experience’. Really? in Iran in 1975. She
Why on earth do you think that the demand for exams, even as part of short two week courses, has
worked for the BBC
World Service, Pearson/
gone through the roof? Why are European governments refusing to pay for publicly-funded school
trips unless the students come back with an exam certificate? Because they are primarily paying for Longman and MET
their students to make progress and they don’t trust you to monitor it and report it back to them. magazine before taking over at the Gazette
in 1987 and also launching Study Travel
Everybody would prefer that students have a good experience. They also want them to be safe. But magazine. Educated in ten schools in seven
the success of any education system is measured on its learning outcomes and those outcomes depend, countries, she speaks ƃ uent French and
according to research by the OECD, largely on the quality of the teachers.
Spanish and rather rusty Italian.
All too often the EFL industry sees teachers as identical widgets which can be picked up and
discarded at will. Take the unnamed Japanese language school which, as we report on page 7, sacked RON RAGSDALE,
two long-standing teachers when they refused to sign away their legal rights. Who came to their
managing editor,
defense? One of their students, a trainee lawyer, whose loyalty lay with his teachers, not with his
Portland State University
school. gained his MA-TESOL at
What students think of your school is largely down to what they think of their teacher. And in Oregon 25 years ago,
that may come down to how much the teacher knows about that student. Which, apart from their and has worked in ELT
language level, is often almost nothing. publishing ever since,
with teaching stints in Istanbul and Cairo.
According to the excellent Cambridge Guide to
What students think Learning English as a Second Language, reviewed on In addition to managing teams at Pearson
of your school is largely page 21, 30-40 per cent of all students suffer from and Cambridge ELT, including as Publishing
Director, Ron has worked with Ministries
down to what they think of language learning anxiety. Do you know who they and local partners in over 30 countries.
are? Do you even know what that is?
their teacher. And how about the 5 to 15 per cent of learners MATT SALUSBURY, news
who, according to the Cambridge Guide, have a editor and journalist, has
Special Educational Need, including dyslexia? You know what dyslexia is. You are probably vaguely worked for EL Gazette
since 2007. He is an
aware it may cause students problems. But do you know what to do to help? activist in the National
As the indefatigable Anne Margaret Smith of ELT Well shows us on page 31, multisensory teaching Union of Journalists and
helps these learners and, indeed, it helps all learners. Don’t believe it? co-edits its newsletter, the
Check out the research news on page 10 that suggests that students learn lexis better when it is Freelance. He taught English for 15 years
in the Netherlands, in Turkey, in a North
presented visually and orally and better still when it is also accompanied with gesture. And no, this is London further education college and
not proof that learning styles exist. The neuroscience shows that the more modalities a student uses, now as an English for Academic Purposes
the more connections are created in the brain. The more senses we use, the merrier. tutor at the London School of Economics.
Dual processing, the advantage of using visual and auditory information, is one of the basic He is a native English speaker and is also
ƃ uent in Dutch.
strategies of metacognition, as Gill Ragsdale explains on page 19.
Metacognition. Why would language schools be interested in that? Perhaps because a study by the GILL RAGSDALE, research
UK’s Education Endowment Foundation found that, compared to other students, learners trained in news reporter,
metacognitive strategies make the equivalent of seven months’ more progress in a single academic
has a PhD in Evolutionary
year. Anthropology from
Cambridge, and teaches
In fact, research suggests that about the only thing that does more to promote progress is to recruit
Psychology with the
and retain a team of high-quality teachers.
Open University, but
And how many language schools can see the sense in that?
also holds an RSA-Cert TEFL. Gill has
MELANIE BUTLER, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF RON RAGSDALE, MANAGING EDITOR taught EFL in the UK, Turkey, Egypt
and to refugees in the Calais ‘Jungle’ in
France. She currently teaches English to
refugees in the UK.
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