Twitter versus the bean seeds: the pressures of keeping across everything

A blog post I read this morning about the importance of editors keeping up-to-date with the latest trends in publishing (What Do Editors Need To Know Now? via White Ink Limited) got me thinking again about how good I am at keeping my finger on the professional pulse – not just of publishing trends, but also of all the ideas relevant to what I do in ELT, EAP, corpora, lexicography and just language trends generally. It seems that since the explosion of social media, there’s so much potentially relevant stuff being flagged up and available out there to check out, I could easily spend more time on ‘professional development’ than I do on actually getting on with work! Facebook and Twitter both seem to daily throw up links to interesting blog posts and online articles, then there’re Twitter chats (like #EAPchat) and Facebook threads. There are webinars and videos of talks to watch, either live or recorded, and of course, I also hear about more ‘real-life’ events worth attending too. A lot of it’s really useful, and often inspiring, stuff, but it just eats time!

And even then, when I meet up with colleagues, I still find myself embarrassingly ill-informed in comparison – whether that’s academic research that my EAP colleagues bandy around or the latest edtech that my techier pals slip nonchalantly into conversation (notice I’m at least picking up some of the jargon though!). Of course, I like to reassure myself that I’m not actually less informed, it’s just that we all tend to focus on different things. Although having a finger in lots of pies, I do sometimes feel like I just skim lots of things and don’t really spend enough time on any of them.

It seems amazing now that I spent the first 10 years or so of my freelancing career relying on not much more than a yearly visit to the IATEFL conference and the odd article in the IATEFL magazine to keep up-to-date with what was going on beyond what I was immediately working on. It makes me wonder ...

• were we all just less-informed and narrower in outlook back then?
• does having all this extra information make us better at what we do?
• is a lot of what’s out there just an unnecessary waste of time? (I do find that I read a lot that goes over the same old ground and it’s only occasionally that I pick out a genuinely useful, informative nugget)
• and if so, what’s the best way to filter out all the ‘noise’ and focus on the genuinely useful stuff?

On that last point, I do feel a bit of an undercurrent, especially on Twitter, of having to be seen to keep up with the right stuff and also of taking a supportive interest in what people you ‘know’ (in the loosest, social media sense of the word) are doing, even when it’s only on the periphery of your own interests. It’s a pressure I try to resist, but definitely one that’s difficult to ignore completely.

I guess everyone has to find their own balance and way of getting what they want from social media and the "information age" generally, and we all go through phases of being more or less connected, and more or less concerned about the pressure to be across everything all the time. Personally, with the coming of spring (at long last!), I think I’m going to be prioritizing time spent in my garden over time in front of my computer over the next few months … and I’m going to try really hard not to feel guilty or out-of-touch as a result!

Daily updates on the progress of my beans!

IATEFL light

I’m on a train on my way back from Liverpool, reflecting on what I think is probably my 13^th IATEFL conference.  I nearly didn’t make it this year, but I’m very glad I did, even though it was a slightly different IATEFL experience from usual. I usually go for the whole week; going to talks, meeting up with folks and just generally soaking up the vibe. As a freelancer, it’s way of keeping in touch with the industry, what’s new, who’s doing what, but it’s also an invaluable source of contacts. All my work comes via contacts and many of them I meet, or reconnect with, during that one week in April each year. 

After a year spent writing for royalties though, this year the coffers were empty and, with no talk for a publisher lined up, I decided I just couldn’t afford to shell out for registration, travel and accommodation for the week. As the conference got nearer though and people kept asking me if I was going, I started to think that I couldn’t afford not to go. So this year, I did IATEFL on a budget. I booked a cheap hotel for a couple of nights (which turned out to be really central and absolutely fine) and went along to the conference without registering. That, of course, meant I couldn’t go to any of the sessions, but I was still able to schmooze around the exhibition hall and arrange to meet up for endless cups of coffee with friends, colleagues and useful contacts, both old and new. It was a bit odd not having a programme of talks to go to and I did feel a bit left out when people kept asking “Did you go to … ?”, but it was still a pretty packed and productive day and a half.

This year’s highlights, from my rather limited viewpoint, included the buzz around getting more people involved in materials writing. With the major publishers and the publishing industry generally clearly in the middle of a huge upheaval at the moment - with the spread of digital content and the challenge of how to make money out of it - it was nice amongst all the uncertainty to also get a feeling that something new, exciting and less exclusive may emerge from it all. Initiatives like ELT Teacher 2 Writer, Nick Robinson’s agency for ELT writers and the round are starting to help new writers become involved in writing good quality materials, either through the traditional publishing channels or in new ways through e-publishing, self-publishing or more local projects. And the launch of the new IATEFL Materials Writing SIG (MaWSIG) seems to signal more interest in sharing skills and best practice. I was lucky enough to be taken on fresh from my MA and trained in-house (at CUP) as a lexicographer. I actually only spent a relatively short time in-house before I went freelance, but it gave me not only a really solid grounding in lexicography and corpus research, but also an insight into how the whole publishing process works and some invaluable contacts to get me started. For new people wanting to make that shift from teaching to publishing now though, the opportunities to learn the ropes seem much more limited. With tight deadlines and even tighter budgets, publishers are often looking for experienced, reliable people (writers, editors, etc.) who can ‘hit the ground running’. So it looks like if we’re going to bring new talent through and keep standards high, then it’s perhaps going to be through sharing skills and experience. I’m definitely looking forward to being involved in some way.

The other novelty for me was meeting people face-to-face who I’ve got to know through social media. I had the odd experience of going up to people I’d never actually met before all smiles and instantly friendly chat, because they’ve become so familiar via my computer screen! I met several other freelancers who I’ve got to know through Facebook and even a fellow #EAPchat regular from Canada, which was great and lovely to put not just a face, but a voice to a name!

I’m heading home with a pile of new business cards, feeling again like I’m part of a community rather than a lone freelancer working away on my own, and also feeling pretty positive about the possibilities ahead … after that is, a well-earned holiday next week ...

Research and evidence in ELT

After the slightly surprising appearance of Ben Goldacre (Guardian science journalist) on last night’s #ELTchat about classroom research (here’s the transcript), I went to bed musing over research and evidence in ELT. It didn’t keep me awake for too long admittedly, but it seemed worth sharing a few of my thoughts here.

First, to explain a bit of background, Ben Goldacre has just written a report for the UK Department for Education about how some of the methods used in science, and particularly Medicine, could be used to provide a more evidence-based approach to education, including in particular randomized trials to determine best practice. His recent Guardian article sets out his basic arguments, or you can read his full report here. Whilst what he has to say makes interesting reading and seems eminently sensible, it did leave me with several nagging “yes buts”.

Yes, but … we do already use research evidence to inform ELT

As an occasional corpus researcher myself, I’m very aware of the huge amount of corpus research that has gone on and is going on using both native speaker and learner corpora in order to determine what language (both vocabulary and grammar) is most useful to teach and how to prioritize what to teach first. This is perhaps most obviously demonstrated in the published teaching materials that a lot of this research feeds into, but it also permeates the profession in more general ways, such as with Averil Coxhead’s Academic Word List which has spread widely in the world of EAP teaching.

Also as someone involved in EAP, I’m always hearing how important it is for EAP practitioners to be involved in research in order to gain the respect of the wider academy (for those of you not in EAP that translates as staff teaching EAP in universities showing that they’re proper academic lecturers by doing research).  And I know that a lot of EAP folks, especially those with proper university posts, put a lot of effort into research.

I’m less up-to-date with other ELT research, but from what I can think of off the top of my head, I suspect that a lot of ELT research generally  is about what language to teach (the corpus research) and how students learn (second language acquisition), rather than so much about teaching practice – the focus of Goldacre’s report. And I also suspect that what research there has been into the effectiveness of different classroom practices is rather small-scale and not always widely applicable. 

Several people in last night’s #ELTchat brought up Penny Ur’s talk at last year’s IATEFL conference It’s all very well in theory but …  about how teachers don’t read and keep up-to-date with research. It was an interesting talk and one point in particular caught my attention enough to follow it up. She pointed to research that suggested teaching lexical sets (a common practice in ELT) was not an effective way to teach vocabulary. As lexical sets in some form are quite prominent in some of the materials I work on, I was a bit worried so followed this up.  When I read the original paper*, I discovered that firstly, it actually only concluded that the practice was not effective with beginner level students (presumably because you’re throwing a whole new set of vocabulary at them and they have no way of processing it, whereas intermediate+ learners already have existing knowledge to slot it in with; a place to file it). Secondly, it was also a very small-scale study and the two groups of learners used (beginner adults and intermediate children) were not directly comparable. That’s not to dismiss the study out of hand, it does raise some very interesting ideas, but it’s clearly not widely generalizable and it certainly doesn’t fall into the kind of wide-scale, systematic, randomized trial that Goldacre is advocating.

It does, however, bring me to my second nagging doubt …

Yes, but … will it work in ELT?

I can see how the population of mainstream school students in the UK can provide an excellent population to study systematically, because although they clearly exhibit a degree of variability, they also share enough common characteristics to be able to generalize the findings of any research across the system. I can see how you could conduct a randomized trial across a large number of classes at the same level, of roughly the same age, in similar size classes, studying the same subject for a similar number of hours per week and across a whole academic year, say. How often could you do that in ELT?! As if I wasn’t already aware from my own varied teaching background, the discussions on #ELTchat, and even on the more specialized #EAPchat, time and again throw up how many different contexts there are in ELT and how different the issues thrown up in different situations can be. It’s much more difficult to compare a class of Greek kids in a private language school, with a group of mixed nationality teens on a two-week summer course, and a businessman taking one-to-one lessons, who could all feasibly be studying, say, pre-intermediate English. Then when you throw in the practical issues of time (many ELT students don’t provide a full-time captive audience), commercial interests (much ELT teaching goes on in the private sector) , lack of a single overall ‘system’, not to mention cultural differences, it all starts to look incredibly messy.

Does all that mean we shouldn’t be conducting research or trying to feed it into classroom practice? Of course not.  I think the goal of such wide-scale systematic research is a really great one and I completely agree with the title of Goldacre’s Guardian article Teachers need to drive the research agenda. But with any research, you have to start off by establishing the whys, whats and hows first and in an area as diverse and messy as ELT, I think that’s quite a challenge. 

* Papathanasiou, E. (2009). An investigation of two ways of presenting vocabulary. ELT Journal, 63(4), 313-322.

Why mistakes matter

Last week, I clicked on a link on a friend’s Facebook page to read an interview in an online fashion magazine. As I started to read, I found that I had to reread the first few lines a couple of times and still couldn’t quite get the flow of the writing. Thinking that in a slightly trendy, arty publication the writer was trying to achieve some kind of creative effect, I read on. I kept, however, stumbling over sentences, having to go back and reparse again and again. Inevitably, given my day job, I started to analyse what it was that was troubling me about the writer’s style, and I started to pick out grammatical errors; missing subjects, mismatched subjects and verbs, awkward parallel constructions. After a while, the awkwardness of the grammar started to really irritate me and eventually, became so tiring, I gave up reading.  It was only then that I noticed the name of the writer and after a bit of clicking around, realized that the website was based in Spain and quite possibly not written, or I suspect even edited, by native English speakers. This perhaps explained the slightly odd writing style, but my first impressions stuck and I couldn’t summon up the energy or ‘understanding’ to go back and finish the article. I don’t mean to be disparaging about the writer’s attempts to write in English. He was clearly a very proficient English speaker and had been ambitious in his writing style and very nearly pulled it off – the errors were not basic, but generally stemmed from his use of more challenging structures. But it seems to me, that if you’re going to publish for an international audience in English (or any language come to that), then you really have to get your writing edited by a native (or near-native) speaker.

I’ve long been interested in the area of learner errors, especially through my long-standing work with the Cambridge Learner Corpus. When I started doing talks about learner errors and how to help students eliminate them, I often came up against resistance along the lines of; but shouldn’t we be encouraging fluency and confidence, not focusing on errors all the time? And I would find myself explaining that yes, of course fluency and confidence are very important, especially in spoken communication, and no, I wasn’t advocating a focus on error correction “all the time”. I do firmly believe though that if we’re going to teach writing skills, then helping students to identify, correct and eventually perhaps eliminate errors has to be a part of that process. And in some contexts, a very important part.

In my own current area of interest, EAP, we bang on a lot about critical thinking and we encourage students to ask critical questions about the accuracy, reliability and credibility of information. These are all qualities that are highly valued in academia – if you’re going to make a claim, your arguments and evidence have to be clear, unambiguous and precise. If a student hands in a piece of writing to their subject tutor that contains inaccuracies or ambiguities, they will quite likely question the students’ understanding of the topic before they put the deficiencies down to language errors.

It seems to me that we’re selling our students short if we mark a piece of written work littered with language errors as “good”, when it clearly isn’t (a brief nod to Jim Scrivener there). Ever since I’ve been involved in ELT, there seems to have been a general distinction made between errors which hamper meaning (bad and to be marked down) and those which don’t (okay to let slide). Whilst that may be valid where simply conveying a message by whatever means possible is our aim, especially in high stakes writing, I don’t think that’s always enough. In the same way that I got tired and irritated by the awkward grammar of my Spanish fashion journalist, a subject tutor ploughing through a pile of student essays may equally feel the linguistic strain placed on them by the errors of their international students, even where they don’t directly impact on the basic meaning.  Even apparently minor errors in academic writing can undermine the writer’s credibility and the degree to which their reader is persuaded of their argument.

So for me, regular error analysis and correction (in a variety of different forms) and occasional activities on ‘basic’ areas of grammar (articles, prepositions, subject-verb agreement) should always have a place in any EAP teacher’s repertoire, even at the highest levels.

RSI Awareness Day: A touch of discomfort

Today, 28 Feb,  is International RSI Awareness Day, so it’s time for my annual reminder to look after yourself at your desk. In previous years, as well as reiterating the basics of ergonomic workstation set-up, I’ve written about the importance of taking regular breaks, the joys of working on paper, the dangers of eyestrain, working safely on a laptop and the potential dangers of mobile devices. This year, I’m returning to the last of these, and in particular, to touchscreen technology.

A couple of months ago, I finally gave in and got my first smartphone. As an RSI sufferer, I’ve been conscious of my tech-life balance since long before it became a buzzword, so I’m not a one for gadgets. I do the hours I have to at my computer for work, then I like to log off completely. As many of my friends know, my mobile is often sitting in the kitchen out of earshot, and often still there when I’m not in the house! Just before Christmas though my trusty old phone, with nice big buttons, finally gave up the ghost and I got a shiny new smartphone to replace it. Having occasionally used my partner’s iPhone, I wasn’t a fan of touchscreens, finding them fiddly, awkward and frustrating, and what’s worse, quite uncomfortable when my hands were bad. People kept telling me that you get used to it and I have to admit, I have … a bit. I’ve tried to adopt the advice given by a friend with chunky fingers and I try not to be too precise with the silly little touch keyboard. He suggested that it’s best to just ‘hit and hope’ and let the predictive text sort out the mess. It does work to an extent, although I’ve sometimes found myself inadvertently deleting a whole message or sending a half-finished one when I’ve hit the wrong ‘button’.

But it’s not sending the odd text that really concerns me in terms of health, it’s the more prolonged use of touchscreen gadgets - smartphones and tablets - that involves lots of awkward, repeated movements of the fingers and thumbs, not to mention slightly awkward wrist positions in the way that people hold devices. Especially with the tiny screens on smartphones, as soon as you do more than check the time, you find yourself having to make lots and lots of very small movements, that because of the accuracy required tend to involve a rather tense hand posture. It’s a classic risk situation for putting strain on the tendons in your hand which over time can so easily lead to cramps and stiffness, then pain and worse-case scenario, permanent damage.

Of course, I can hear you all saying, but I don’t use my phone/tablet for prolonged periods, I only have the occasional check. … Are you sure? If you’re anything like my friends or the people I see around me, you’re probably using it more than you think. It’s become so much a part of people’s lives, that they’re just not conscious of it. Try just for today counting how many times you pick up your phone and how many movements you make each time you “just check”.

And it’s not just gadgets, with the appearance of Windows 8, an increasing number of laptops and pcs are becoming touchscreen. Because the screens are larger, they’re less fiddly and with more text per screen, they obviously don’t involve the constant scrolling motion needed on a smartphone. They do, however, bring their own risks, especially in terms of desk set-up. Any ergonomist will recommend that you have the top of your screen at eye level so that you’re not looking down and putting strain on your neck. They’ll also advise you to have it at least arm's length away as the best focal distance to avoid eyestrain. Even working on a laptop, as I am at the moment, I have it propped up on books so that the screen’s in the right position as well as using a separate keyboard and mouse.

 

That, of course, makes for a very awkward stretch though if you need to touch the screen, raising your arm to a level that will soon cause shoulder strain and leaning towards the screen in a posture to make any physio cringe!

 

Touchscreens may seem sexy and intuitively, ‘easier’ to use, but I’m yet to be convinced that they’re good for us.