Page 33 - ELG2001 Jan Issue 468

El•Gazette 468.qxp_El•Gazette 468 08/01/2020 15:59 Page 33

FEATURES & COMMENT

ALAMY Following Brexit, do you see this as an
opportunity for ELT in Ireland? How
will the industry - and the profession -
cope with the increased demand?
Post-Brexit, Ireland and Malta will be the
only two English-speaking destinations for
ELT within the EU. This has to be a major
opportunity for both countries. Given the
greater capacity in Ireland, it should mean a
growth in the numbers of students coming
here.
In Ireland, we have an amazing cohort of
teachers in the ELT sector. We have
wonderful leadership in our professional
practice through the teacher-led ELT Ireland
and we have in place a national body with
oversight of all matters relating to quality and
excellence: the Accreditation and Coordination
of English Language Services (ACELS).
However, we need to look after our
teachers. Education is highly valued in
Ireland, but because ELT is in the private
sector, teachers cannot enjoy the benefits,
protections and even basics of job security,
pay and pensions that are a given for most of
their state-sector counterparts.
An underlying tension of course is that we
are talking about an industry on one hand
that depends so much on the highly
professional teachers of English in Ireland,
many of whom hold postgraduate
qualifications. On the other hand, while our
schools are highly regulated for quality and
accreditation purposes, regulation in the ELT
sector is very much needed in relation to the
pay and conditions of teachers.

Anne O’Keeffe is
Senior Lecturer in
Applied Linguistics
at Mary
Immaculate College,
University of
Limerick, Ireland.
This makes them really useful for English This advice comes from my work with
language teachers as well as learners. I would Geraldine Mark on the English Grammar
love to have had access to such resources Profile. One of the big breakthroughs in Calling Irish Teachers
when writing the book to show how the Second Language Acquisition in the 1980s Deborah Tobin, a PhD student in Applied
interface could be used in the classroom. For was the acknowledgement that the language Linguistics at Mary Immaculate College, is
any reader eager to try this out, I can highly of learners is systematic. The coining of the conducting a national study of ELT
recommend Robert Poole’s recent book: A term ‘interlanguage’ in that decade reflected teachers right now. She is capturing the
Guide to Using Corpora for English Language this. It was a move away from the notion of voice of teachers in Ireland to establish a
Learners (Edinburgh University Press). learner language being an impoverished baseline of information on teachers in this
Another area that I would love to retrofit version of the native speaker ideal. sector.
into the book is a chapter on ‘corpus From this, we have evolved a honed sense She will interview ELT teachers to find
pragmatics’. This is a new term reflecting the of learner language having stages and levels. out their perceptions of the industry in
link between corpus linguistics and the study We have also developed frameworks of learner Ireland, to investigate their chosen career
of pragmatics. For me, pragmatic competence competence, such as the CEFR, that help us paths and how they view themselves
is a key area of communicative competence. identify where along the ‘pathway of learning’ within this community of practice. This
I’ve just published the second edition of my our learners are. Now, with more and more will be done through face-to-face, focus
book with Brian Clancy and Svenja Adolphs, learner corpus data available to us, we are able group interviews and through invitation to
Introducing Pragmatics in Use, and it includes to get fine-grained detail on the typical complete an online questionnaire survey.
a chapter on the applications of corpus vocabulary and grammar, etc. that learners The survey is available at:
pragmatics in language teaching. know by a certain stage of their learning. https://micquality.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/for
It’s important that our syllabi are in line m/SV_9Y3wWrASnm5LM9f
A lot of EFL teachers associate you with these empirical findings from learner Any ELT teachers in the Republic of
with the philosophy, “Why teach corpora. For publishers, this can be a slow Ireland interested in taking part in an
things your students can't do at this and painful process! If certain grammar interview, should get in touch at
level? Concentrate on what they can points are always taught at a certain level, it Deborah.Tobin@mic.ul.ie
succeed at.” is hard to change that.
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