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Robert Leitch Site Editor |
An English teacher since 2001, Robert is currently working freelance in St. Petersburg, occasionally travelling to Scandinavia on secret missions ;) The rest of the time, he's maintaining VisaRus and trying to get it recognised as the top EFL site in Russia. |
| As competition in the EFL industry grows, the load on teachers increases proportionally with the extravagance of marketing claims made by profit-driven schools... | ||
Breeding Misconceptions
Just as Tide and Persil battle for household supremacy with their claims of ‘whiter than white’, ‘whiter than ever’ and ‘now blindingly white’, many schools in Russia are making similarly outrageous statements in their attempts to secure a share of the increasingly competitive EFL market. Each teaches English faster or more effectively than the last, with ever better teachers, materials and ‘specially-developed courses’ to ensure linguistic perfection.
How many of these schools deliver on their promises? High demand for staff means that many institutions hire unqualified teachers, often with little or no work experience. Some schools run ‘internship’ programmes, and there are a few which offer in-house certificate training, but many of the certified teachers have nothing more than a CELTA- the most basic teaching qualification available.
Employment prospects for good English speakers are getting better by the day as business traffic with the West grows. Lured by seductive marketing messages that seem to promise guaranteed, effortless learning, students are flocking to mainstream private schools for lessons with native teachers. Many are seeking the elusive ‘miracle cure’ that will relieve them of all their English-related ailments and secure them a successful future.
In reality, for most students, such schools are doing little more than raising false hopes. In my experience, the more a student pays for his lessons, the more he expects the teacher to take personal responsibility for his learning. There seems to be a widely held misconception that ‘native speakers’ hold some mystical ability that facilitates ‘absorption’ of their language, as if simply standing in the vicinity of a real English speaker will result in learning by osmosis. I am always reminded of sleep-hypnosis from Brave New World. Teaching a group of catatonic office managers at the end of a hard day’s work is probably not far from what Huxley visualised.
What implications does this have for us as teachers? Perhaps the most serious is that we have to dispel the fallacy that English can be learned ‘quickly and effectively’. Without doubt, an experienced, organised teacher can shave a good few years off the time it would take a student to reach fluency with a less proficient teacher, but there are no easy ways to get ahead. Students have to realise that no matter how much money they pay, there is no substitute for hard work, and that fabled ‘native teachers’ are not genies in magic textbooks.
Tell a group of students who have just paid over the odds for a specially-qualified ‘native teacher’ using a ‘specially developed course’ that they’re going to have to study committedly in and out of class and participate fully in lessons, and you’ll hear muffled groans of disappointment. Try to make them work hard and pay attention throughout the course and you may eventually meet with stiff resistance and vocal disagreement. At least one student is going to whisper to his neighbour that you a charlatan, and don't know how to teach English. In schools where I’ve worked in Russia I have found a widespread attitude that students should be kept ‘entertained’ throughout lessons. Hard work seems to be an anathema in EFL.
Certainly, lessons have to be interesting, especially when they last anywhere from ninety minutes to three hours, but adults have to be prepared to exercise their intellects and put some real effort into learning. One CELTA trainer I worked with said, “We’re not really teachers, we’re stage entertainers. It doesn’t matter to a school whether you actually teach well or not, as long as you can go through the motions and convince the students that they’re getting their pound of flesh.”
One of my clients, a successful, forward-thinking company with offices across America and in the UK, seems to be as caught up in the EFL pantomime as the rest of Russia. An internal announcement about the hiring of an actor in the main US office comes to mind. The top management of the company seemed to believe that this man would teach everyone to speak English ‘properly’ through the use of theatrical breathing methods and telephone conversation. Anyone who wanted to perfect his English only had to call the office and talk to the actor. For myself and my American teaching colleague based in the company’s Saint Petersburg office, it was relieving to know that fluency was just a phone call away, and that our services were as good as redundant.
Another myth fostered by the teaching industry is that anyone can learn to speak English. The truth of this statement obviously depends on the target level, be it basic phrases for travel abroad, or total fluency for international board meetings, but on the whole it dumps a great burden on us as professional teachers. Language proficiency is an art, not a science. I currently have a student who has spent almost twenty years studying English, through school and university to work, where he has had several years of study with native teachers. He is still at elementary level and, despite his best efforts, still has difficulty answering basic questions such as ‘how are you’ and ‘where do you come from’.
The industry might collapse if it were to openly accept that language acquirement depends on students’ abilities, rather than the proficiency of teachers or the methodology of courses. Without hard work, and the motivation to sustain a high level of effort throughout a course of study, even the most gifted of students will stagnate and fail to progress. The onus must be placed on the student, not the teacher. Just as some people will never learn to play the piano, not everyone can learn a foreign language. But try suggesting that in EFL circles and you risk being outcast as a heretic. We work in a strangely Orwellian industry founded on the doctrines of business rather than principles of education. As long as it continues to develop in this direction we face a continued uphill struggle against the unrealistic expectations and demands that it breeds.
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