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.

IATEFL day one

Today was the first day of the IATEFL conference and saw a couple of interesting talks plus some good meetings with friends and colleagues.

I went to the Pearson discussion session - Which words are worth the worry? - with Diane and Norbert Schmitt in Brighton and Averil Coxhead and Paul Nation on a Skype link from New Zealand. It was an interesting session for several reasons. Firstly, it was an odd format. Although the Skype link-up worked quite well, it meant that Diane and Norbert were in the room, but sat at a desk in front of a webcam, which meant you couldn't see them. So the whole thing was very much of a listening exercise with little to look at and it was quite difficult to maintain concentration.

It was fascinating to see Averil Coxhead, albeit only on the screen. She's someone whose work I've followed and had a lot to do with in recent years and who I suppose I had a mental image of. And she looked absolutely nothing like I'd imagined! Some of her comments were very interesting though. One thing that really struck me was when she was talking about potential mismatches between what we think we're teaching students (in terms of vocabulary) and what they think is important to learn. She told a story about a Chinese student who said she was only interested in learning verbs, not nouns, because Chinese people like to do things! It was one of those really interesting thoughts that really got me thinking. I've made a mental note to ask my own (mostly Chinese) students in the summer what kind of language they think is most important to learn. I'm intrigued to see whether Chinese learners really do have a preference for verbs!

I also went to a really interesting session with a former teaching colleague, Catherine Mitsaki, about critical friend groups. She talked about a project in which she put EAP students into groups to critique each others' writing work and to provide peer feedback on a regular basis throughout a course. The idea being to promote critical thinking and encourage learners to be more independent rather than always relying on the teacher. It was a really interesting idea and one I'm definitely going to mull over before I teach again in August. I'm not sure it'll be quite as effective in such a short course (just 5 weeks) as it seems like an idea that takes some time for students to be comfortable with and really start to benefit from. I'm sure I can take elements of it though.

Some interesting food for thought today and looking forward to more tomorrow.