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.

A year in the Twittersphere

I've been having so much fun on Twitter over the past couple of days (I'll explain why later!) that this afternoon I started mulling over a blog post about my experience. Then when I checked, it turned out that I actually joined Twitter exactly a year ago today … now that's what you call serendipity and this post just had to be written!

I actually first ventured into the Twittersphere because my local baker, the lovely Laura Hart, had had to close up shop and suggested I follow her on Twitter as she looked for new premises. In the 12 months since, I have managed to grab the odd one of her delicious custard tarts when she's tweeted that she's selling them somewhere, and now it seems that she's finally found a new permanent home for her bakery – hooray! Sadly, it's on the other side of town, but I'm still looking forward to visiting when she opens. My Twitter experience hasn't all been about patisserie however …

I decided early on that I wasn't interested in celebrity gossip or what Stephen Fry had had for lunch, so decided to restrict my Twitter activity to work-related topics and ‘professional development’. I started off by following a few of the obvious ELT names and a couple of publishers. Then I ventured into the discussion thread, #ELTchat, partly as it's moderated by a very old friend of mine, Shaun Wilden. The first couple of times I ‘tuned in’, it was all just a bit overwhelming, but I slowly got the hang of it. And once I'd been introduced to Hootsuite, and was able to separate out different ‘streams’ on screen, the confusing babble started to make more sense and I got up the courage to start joining in. Although reading the chat and comments from teachers all over the world was a fascinating experience, I soon found that I often had to plough through a lot of stuff that I wasn't really interested in, just to come away with couple of, more or less, interesting points. I still keep an eye on what topics come up, but only dip in if it's something I'm particularly interested in.

Next, I came across #EAPchat, my area of special interest at the moment, which seemed more promising. When I tuned in for my first session though, it turned out to be a slightly stilted ‘conversation’ between myself and just one other teacher! Thankfully, @sharonzspace (aka Sharon Turner, an EAP teacher working in Turkey) piqued my interest just enough to encourage me to come back! As a much newer and more niche chat, #EAPchat (1^st and 3^rd Mondays of the month at 6pm UK time) still generally only attracts a handful of active participants, but on a good day, there are enough of us to get a decent discussion going now. The main frustration I come up against is in trying to discuss what are often quite complex issues condensed down into just a few words. You often find that you'll put out a comment, somebody else will come back with a critique, and you'll then spend your next few tweets trying to explain why they've misunderstood what you really intended! To me, it seems that Twitter comes into its own perhaps less as a space in which to fully discuss ideas, but as a place to get things started, then for sharing links to blogs etc. where there's more space for those discussions. Through Twitter and the EAPchat hashtag, I've come across all sorts of interesting resources, blogs and discussions, and got involved in commenting and discussing all kinds of topics at more length.

Perhaps one of the most interesting, and for me unexpected, benefits of Twitter has been building what's known in the jargon as a PLN, a network of contacts made up of people interested in the same stuff as you. It's something that’s still building gradually, but there are definitely a few folks out there who I now come across regularly and who are starting to feel ‘familiar’. But then I suppose that's what social (or professional?) networking is meant to be all about, isn't it?

And what have I been having so much fun with in the Twittersphere lately? Well, yesterday I came across the Twitter Fiction Festival - in that social media kind of way, I can't remember exactly how I found it, possibly through a post on Facebook that linked to an article in the Guardian? Anyway, I started following #twitterfiction. As with a lot on Twitter, it took me a while to wade through all the ‘noise’ and actually, quite a lot of content in other languages too, but I gradually started picking out little gems of sharp, witty, teeny-weeny fiction. I soon latched on to the #litmash thread, attempts to mash up different combinations of literary genres; so yesterday there was some hilarious Edgar Allan Poe versus Dr Seuss (check out a summary of some of the best here) and today I've been laughing out loud at Cold War fairy tales and Sex in a Dystopian City! If you're on Twitter and understand what I've been talking about, then it's well worth checking out, LOL!