 questions & answers
Here are some commonly asked questions during Dr. Richards' lecture
tours, and his responses....
Question:
I believe your books are quite popular in Iran. Are these legitimate
copies of your books?
Dr Richards Responds:
Unfortunately not. Copies of my books sold in Iran are unauthorized
reprints by local publishers who pay no compensation to the publishers or me
as author, for copies sold. For this reason I do not make promotional visits
or offer teacher-training support in Iran while this situation exists.
Question:
Who should I contact for information about the availability of any of
your books?
Dr Richards Responds:
You should contact the distributors who sell Cambridge University
Press and Oxford University Press books in your country. I am not in a
position to provide sample copies of any of my publications.
Question:
Who should I contact if I need permission to use extracts from any of
your books for research or other purposes?
Dr Richards Responds:
You should write to the copyright division of the publisher, at the
publisher's address given in the book.
Question:
I am conducting research in language teaching and need information
related to my research. Can you help me?
Dr Richards Responds:
Unfortunately my work schedule does not allow time for this.
Question:
What can we do about fossilized errors?
Dr Richards Responds:
Fossilized errors are indeed a big problem for many learners.
I believe a two stage strategy is needed to address them.
First of all is developing awareness of errors. Learners are
unlikely to correct errors unless they recognize them in their
own speech. So techniques are needed which require students
to monitor their own speech as well as others' speech, (or
writing), to identify problematic errors. They also need to
practice self-correction, and also they need to learn ways
of tactfully correcting fossilized errors in their classmate's
speech.
Question:
What additional activities are available to use with the
New Interchange series?
Dr Richards Responds:
The New Interchange website now contains a huge range of
excellent additional activities for each level of the course.
Most of these have been developed by Kate Cory-Wright, an
outstanding teacher and teacher trainer, based in Ecuador.
Question:
Where can I get information about current trends in methods
and explanations of terms like the "post methods era"
? What about trends in syllabus design?
Dr Richards Responds:
You will find these discussed in the second edition of my
book "Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching"
(with Ted Rodgers, Cambridge University Press). Trends in
syllabus design are the focus of a chapter in my book "Curriculum
Development in Language Teaching", also published by
CUP.
Question:
What learning strategies affect speaking?
Dr Richards Responds:
See the discussion of learning strategies and speaking in
my article "30 Years of TESOL", available on my
website.
Question:
What is the significance of learners' errors form the theoretical
and practical perspective?
Dr Richards Responds:
From the theoretical perspectives, errors can provide evidence
of the following:
- the difficulty of certain target structures
- learners' use of communication strategies
- transfer of items from the mother tongue
- evidence of restructuring, the process by which learners
add on new items to their linguistic repertoire
- fossilization
From the practical perspective, errors can suggest items
that need re-teaching or additional practice, as well as provide
information about the learners' current level of language
proficiency.
Question:
Is the PPP lesson model still relevant in the days of communicative
language teaching and other recent methodologies?
Dr Richards Responds:
This is an interesting question. I think the basic PP framework
is still supportable, though nowadays it has different goals.
I see it as something like this:
- Presentation phase - nowadays this is seen as the
input-provision phase, during which we provide focused input,
including the opportunity to recognize new language forms,
functions, grammar items etc. I see dialogs and other activities
that provide an opportunity to DISPLAY new language items,
as having this function.
- Practice phase - this can be seen as the time when
the learner experiments and tests out hypotheses. The need
to provide an opportunity for controlled practice, is still
valid in my opinion. Elements of the context are controlled
so that the learner can better focus on experimenting with
new items.
- Production phase - this is the period when real
communication is practiced and where the focus is on fluency.
Many people today also move these phases around. i.e. one
can start with a production activity, and then later on follow
up with presentation, i.e. based on students' performance.
Because the terms PPP are also considered a little old fashioned,
other terms are preferred to describe this sequence, e.g.
INPUT, EXPERIMENTING, COMMUNICATION, or some such.
Question:
How do you think our understanding of the goals of teaching
English has changed in recent years?
Dr Richards Responds:
Today English is so widely taught worldwide that the purposes
for which it is learned are sometimes taken for granted. 30
years ago the assumption was that teaching English was a politically
neutral activity and acquiring it would bring untold blessings
to those who succeeded in learning it. It would lead to educational
and economic empowerment. English was regarded as the property
of the English-speaking world, particularly Britain and the
US. Native-speakers of the language had special insights and
superior knowledge about teaching it. And it was above all
the vehicle for the expression of a rich and advanced culture
or cultures, whose literary artifacts had universal value.
This picture has changed somewhat today. Now that English
is the language of globalization, international communication,
commerce and trade, the media and pop culture, different motivations
for learning it come into play. English is no longer viewed
as the property of the English-speaking world but is an international
commodity sometimes referred to as World English or English
as an International Language. The cultural values of Britain
and the US are often seen as irrelevant to language teaching,
except in situations where the learner has a pragmatic need
for such information. The language teacher need no longer
be an expert on British and American culture and a literature
specialist as well. Bisong
(1995) says that in Nigeria, English is simply one of
a number of languages that form the speech repertoire of Nigerians
which they learn “for pragmatic reasons to do with maximizing
their chances of success in a multilingual and multicultural
society.” English is still promoted as a tool that will
assist with educational and economic advancement but is viewed
in many parts of the world as one that can be acquired without
any of the cultural trappings that go with it. Proficiency
in English is needed for employees to advance in international
companies and improve their technical knowledge and skills.
It provides a foundation for what has been called “process
skills” – those problem-solving and critical thinking
skills that are needed to cope with the rapidly changing environment
of the workplace, one where English is plays a growingly important
role.
In the nineteen seventies the target for learning was assumed
to be a native-speaker variety of English and it was the native
speaker’s culture, perceptions, and speech that were
crucial in setting goals for English teaching. The native
speaker had a privileged status as “owners of the language,
guardians of its standards, and arbiters of acceptable pedagogic
norms” (Jenkins
2000:5). Today local varieties of English such as Filipino
English and Singapore English are firmly established as a
result of indigenization, and in contexts where English is
a foreign language there is less of a pressure to turn foreign-language
speakers of English (Koreans, Taiwanese, Japanese etc) into
mimics of native speaker English, be it an American, British,
or Australian variety. The extent to which a learner seeks
to speak with a native-like accent and sets this as his or
her personal goal, is a personal one. It is not necessary
to try to eradicate the phonological influences of the mother
tongue nor to seek to speak like a native speaker. Jennifer
Jenkins in her recent book argues that RP pronunciation is
an unattainable and an unnecessary target for second language
learners, and she proposes a phonological syllabus that maintains
core phonological distinctions but is a reduced inventory
from RP. A pronunciation syllabus for EIL would thus not be
a native-speaker variety but would be a phonological core
that would provide for phonological intelligibility but not
seek to eradicate the influence of the mother tongue.
The messages of critical theory and critical pedagogy have
also prompted reflection on the hidden curriculum that sometimes
underlies language teaching polices and practices. The theory
of linguistic imperialism argues that education and English
language teaching in particular, are not politically neutral
activities. Mastery of English, it is claimed, enhances the
power and control of a privileged few. Critical theorists
have turned their attention to the status of English and the
drain on education resources it demands in many countries
and its role in facilitating the domination of multinational
corporations. Teachers are now encouraged to examine and confront
the underlying ideologies of texts and textbooks. Textbooks,
no longer seen as indispensable tools, are viewed as controlling
instruments, hindering the creativity of the teacher, maintained
in place through the pressure of publishers, and may result
in the deskilling of teachers through their recycling of old,
but tried and tested teaching techniques. They are transmitters
of a dominant and dominating ideology. Critics of language
programs for refugees and immigrants have pointed out that
often these programs seek to provide the means by which learners
can enter dead end low paid jobs rather than genuinely seek
to empower them.
In practice however in many parts of the world this has meant
little more than standards of political correctness being
applied to the content of textbooks. Content of books is carefully
scrutinized to ensure that they represent diversity, though
many of the topics teachers and perhaps learners would like
to see in textbooks are still taboo. McCarthy
(2001,132) writing about Critical Discourse Analysis has
pointed out that “there is a whiff of political correctness
in much of what CDA presents, and a middle-class left-wing
bias and academic elitism which is often thinly disguised
behind the unquestioned caring for minorities and the oppressed
which CDA practitioners sincerely possess”.
Question:
How has our view of methods changed? What do people think
of “methods” today?
Dr Richards Responds:
The 1970s ushered in an era of change and innovation in
language teaching methodology. This was the decade during
which Communicative Language Teaching came to replace Audiolingualism
and the Structural-Situational Approach. And it was during
this decade that we heard about such novel methods as Total
Physical Response, The Silent Way, and Counseling Learning.
Improvements in language teaching would come about through
the adoption of new and improved teaching approaches and methods
that incorporated breakthroughs in our understanding of language
and how language learning takes place.
Thirty years later, while Communicative Language Teaching
is still alive and well many of the “novel” methods
of the 1970s have largely disappeared. And so to a large extent
has the question that attracted so much interest at that time:
“What is the best method to teach a second or foreign
language?” We are now in what has been termed the post
methods era. How did we get there?
Many of the more innovative methods of the 1970s had a very
short shelf-life (Richards
and Rodgers 2001). Because they were linked to very specific
claims and to prescribed practices they tended to fall out
of favor as these practices became unfashionable or discredited.
The heyday of methods can be considered to have lasted until
the late 1980s. One of the strongest criticisms of the “new
methods” was that they were typically “top-down”.
Teachers had to accept on faith the claims or theory underlying
the method and apply them in their own practice. Good teaching
was regarded as correct use of the method and its prescribed
principles and techniques. Roles of teachers and learners
as well as the type of activities and teaching techniques
to be used in the classroom, were generally prescribed. Likewise,
learners were often viewed as the passive recipients of the
method who should submit themselves to its regime of exercises
and activities. The post methods era has thus led to a focus
on the processes of learning and teaching rather than ascribing
a central role to methods as the key to successful teaching.
As language teaching moved away from a search for the perfect
method, attention shifted to how teachers could develop and
explore their own teaching through reflective teaching and
action research. This, it was argued, could lead to the revitalization
of teaching from the inside rather than by trying to make
teachers and teaching conform to an external model
(Richards
and Lockhart, 1994).
Perhaps this difference in orientation explains why Communicative
Language Teaching has survived into the new millennium. Because
it refers to a diverse set of rather general and uncontroversial
principles Communicative Language Teaching can be interpreted
in many different ways and used to support a wide variety
of classroom procedures. The principles themselves can be
summarized as follows:
- The goal of language learning is communicative competence
- Learners learn a language through using it to communicate
- Authentic and meaningful communication should be the
goal of classroom activities
- Fluency and accuracy are both important dimension of
communication
- Communication involves the integration of different language
skills
- Learning is a gradual process that involves trial and
error
Several contemporary teaching approaches such as Content
Based Instruction, Cooperative Language Learning, and Task-Based
Instruction can all claim to be applications of these principles
and hence continue as mainstream approaches today.
In the last thirty years there has also been a substantial
change in where and how learning takes place. In the seventies
teaching mainly took place in the classroom and in the language
laboratory. The teacher used chalk and talk and the textbook.
Technology amounted to the tape recorder and film strips.
However towards the end of the seventies learning began to
move away from the teacher’s direct control and into
the hands of learners through the use of individualized learning,
group work and project work.
The contexts and resources for learning have also seen many
changes since the 1970s. Learning is not confined to the classroom:
it can take place at home or in other places as well as at
school, using the computer and other forms of technology.
Today’s teachers and learners live in a technology-enhanced
learning environment. Videos, computers and the internet are
accessible to almost all teachers and learners and in smart
schools the language laboratory has been turned into a multimedia
center that supports on-line-learning. Technology has facilitated
the shift from teacher-centered to learner-centered learning.
Students now spend time interacting not with the teacher,
but with other learners using chatrooms that provide access
to more authentic input and learning processes and that make
language learning available at any time.
In the last decade or so language teaching has also been
influenced by concepts and practices from the corporate world.
In the seventies, four ingredients were seen as essential
to provide for effective teaching: teachers, methods, course
design, and tests. Teaching was viewed rather narrowly as
a self-contained activity that didn't need to look much beyond
itself. Improvements in teaching would come about through
fine-tuning methods, course design, materials and tests. By
comparison effective language teaching today is seen both
as a pedagogical problem and well as an organizational one.
On the pedagogical side teachers are no longer viewed merely
as skilled implementers of a teaching method but as creators
of their own individual teaching methods, as classroom researchers,
and curriculum and materials developers. Beyond the pedagogical
level however and at the level of the institution, schools
are increasingly viewed as having similar characteristics
to other kinds of complex organizations in terms of organizational
activities and processes and can be studied as a system involving
inputs, processes, and outputs. Teaching is embedded within
an organizational and administrative context and influenced
by organizational constraints and processes. In order to manage
schools efficiently and productively it is necessary to understand
the nature of the organizational activities that occur in
schools, the problems that these activities create, and how
they can be effectively and efficiently managed and controlled.
These activities include setting and accomplishing organizational
goals, allocating resources to organizational participants,
coordinating organizational events and processes, and setting
policies to improve their functioning.
This management-view of education has brought into language
teaching concepts and practices from the commercial world,
with an emphasis on planning, efficiency, communication processes,
targets and standards, staff development, learning outcomes
and competencies, quality assurance, strategic planning, performance
appraisal, and best practice. We have thus seen a movement
away from an obsession with pedagogical processes to a focus
on organizational systems and processes and their contribution
to successful language programs.
Question:
What do you think is the role of grammar in language teaching?
Dr Richards Responds:
In the 1970s we were just nearing the end of a period during
which grammar had a controlling influence on language teaching.
Approaches to grammar teaching and the design of course books
at that time reflected a view of language that saw the sentence
and sentence grammar as forming the building blocks of language,
language learning, and language use (McCarthy
2001). The goal of language teaching was to understand
how sentences are used to create different kinds of meaning,
to master the underlying rules for forming sentences from
lower-level grammatical units such as phrases and clauses,
and to practice using them as the basis for written and spoken
communication. Syllabuses were essentially grammar-based and
grammar was a primary focus of teaching techniques. Correct
language use was achieved through a drill and practice methodology
and through controlled speaking and writing exercises that
sought to prevent or minimize opportunities for errors. The
title of the textbook I taught from in those days echoed the
emphasis on controlled practice - Practice and Progress (Alexander
1967). Practice was viewed as the key to learning, embedded
within a methodology with the following features (Ellis
2002, 168):
- 1. A specific grammatical feature is isolated for focused
attention.
- 2. The learners are required to produce sentences containing
the targeted feature.
- 3. The learners will be provided with opportunities for
repetition of the targeted feature
- 4. There is an expectancy that the learners will perform
the grammatical feature correctly, therefore practice activities
are success oriented.
- 5. The learners receive feedback on whether their performance
of the grammatical structure is correct or not. This feedback
may be immediate or delayed.
But in the 1970s Chomsky’s theories of language and
his distinction between competence and performance were starting
to have an impact on language teaching. His theory of “transformational
grammar” for example, with core kernel sentences that
were transformed through the operation of rules to produce
more complex sentences sought to capture the nature of a speaker’s
linguistic competence. It seemed to offer an exciting new
approach to grammar teaching, and for a while in the early
seventies was reflected in popular text book series such as
O’Neill’s Kernel Lessons (O’Neill
1974). Exercises in which learners “transformed”
sentences into more complex ones lay at the heart of Kernel
Lessons and similar courses.
Gradually throughout the seventies the sentence as the central
unit of focus became replaced by a focus on language in use
with the emergence of the notion of communicative competence
as well as functional approaches to the study of language
such as Halliday’s theory of functional grammar. Krashen’s
monitor model of language learning and his distinction between
acquisition (the unconscious process by which language develops
as a product of real communication and exposure to appropriate
input) and learning (the development of knowledge about the
rules of a language) as well as his claims about the role
of comprehensible input also prompted a reassessment of the
status of grammar in language teaching and the value of explicit
grammar instruction. Proposals emerged for an implicit approach
to the teaching of grammar or a combination of explicit and
implicit approaches.
The development of communicative methodologies to replace
the grammar-based methodologies of the seventies also resulted
in a succession of experiments with different kinds of syllabuses
(e.g. notional, functional, and content based) and an emphasis
on both accuracy and fluency as goals for learning and teaching.
The difference between accuracy-focused and fluency-focused
activities can be shown as follows:
Accuracy-focused activities
- reflect typical classroom use of language
- focus on the formation of correct examples of language
use
- produce language for display (i.e. as evidence of learning)
- call on explicit knowledge
- elicit a careful (monitored) speech style
- reflect controlled performance
- practice language out of context
- practice small samples of language
- do not require authentic communication
Fluency-focused activities
- reflect natural language use
- call on implicit knowledge
- elicit a vernacular speech style
- reflect automatic performance
- require the use of improvising, paraphrasing, repair
and reorganization
- produce language that is not always predictable
- allow students to select the language they use
- require real communication
However the implementation of communicative and fluency-based
methodology did not resolve the issue of what to do about
grammar. The promise that the communicative methodologies
would help learners develop both communicative competence
as well as linguistic competence did not always happen. Programs
where there was an extensive use of “authentic communication”,
particularly in the early stages of learning reported that
students often developed fluency at the expense of accuracy
resulting in learners with good communication skills but a
poor command of grammar and a high level of fossilization
(Higgs
and Clifford 1982). To address this problem it was argued
that classroom activities should provide opportunities for
the following processes to take place (Ellis
2002):
- 1. Noticing (the learner becomes conscious of the presence
of a linguistic feature in the input, where previously she
had ignored it)
- 2. Comparing (the learner compares the linguistic feature
noticed in the input with her own mental grammar, registering
to what extent there is a ‘gap’ between the
input and her grammar)
- 3. Integrating or restructuring (the learner integrates
a representation of the new linguistic feature into her
mental grammar)
Proposals as to how these processes can be realized within
the framework of current communicative methodologies include:
- Incorporating a more explicit treatment of grammar within
a text-based curriculum
- Building a focus on form into task-based teaching through
activities centering on consciousness raising or noticing
grammatical features of input or output
- Using activities that require “stretched output”,
i.e. which expand or ‘restructure” the learner’s
grammatical system though increased communicative demands
and attention to linguistic form
Question:
How would you characterize current approaches to the preparation
of language teachers?
Dr Richards Responds:
In the past, learning to teach English as a second language
was a process of acquiring a body of knowledge and skills
from an external source, i.e. from experts. It was a kind
of top-down process based on modeling good practices, the
practices themselves built around a standard or recognized
teaching method. Becoming a language teacher meant acquiring
a set of discrete skills - lesson planning, techniques for
presenting and practicing new teaching points and for teaching
the four skills. The approach that dominated graduate courses
at this time consisted of a limited diet of theory courses,
mainly confined to linguistics (syntax, morphology, semantics),
phonetics, English grammar and sometimes literature, plus
the study of methodology.
In the last 10 years or so a sub-field of language teaching
has emerged now known as second language teacher education
(Roberts,
1998). This refers to the study of the theory and practice
of teacher development for language teachers. In the last
thirty years there has also developed a substantial industry
devoted to providing language teachers with professional training
and qualifications. The knowledge base of language teaching
has also expanded substantially although there are still significant
differences of opinion concerning what the essential knowledge
base of language teaching consists of. Experts arrive at different
answers to questions such as the following:
- Is language teaching a branch of applied linguistics
or a branch of education?
- How much linguistics do teachers need to know and whose
linguistic theories are most relevant?
- What are the essential subjects in a pre-service or in-service
curriculum for language teachers?
- Do teachers need to know how to carry out research? If
so, what kind of research?
Due to this lack of consensus as to the theoretical basis
for language teaching, the kind of professional preparation
teachers may receive varies considerably from country to country
or even from institution to institution within a country,
as a comparison of MA TESOL degrees in Canada and the United
States reveals.
There has been a marked shift in our understanding of what
we mean by teacher preparation. In the past the idea of teacher
training dominated but beginning in the 1990s teacher development
assumed a more central role (Richards
1998). Teacher training involves processes of the following
kind:
- Understanding basic concepts and principles as a prerequisite
for applying them to teaching
- Expanding one’s repertoire of routines, skills
and strategies
- Trying out new strategies in the classroom
- Monitoring oneself and getting feedback from others on
one’s practice
Teacher development serves a longer-term goal and seeks to
facilitate growth of the teacher’s general understanding
of teaching and of himself or herself as a teacher. It often
involves examining different dimensions of one’s own
practice as a basis for reflective review, and can hence be
seen as “bottom-up”. The following are examples
of goals from a development perspective:
- Understanding how the process of second language development
occurs
- Understanding how teachers’ roles change according
to the kind of learners he or she is teaching
- Understanding the kinds of decision-making that occurs
during lessons
- Reviewing one’s own theories and principles of
language teaching
- Developing an understanding of different styles of teaching
- Determining learners’ perceptions of classroom
activities
- Acquiring the skills of a mentor
Comparing the two perspectives on teacher education Freeman
observed
(Freeman 1982, 21-22):
Training deals with building specific teaching skills: how
to sequence a lesson or how to teach a dialogue, for instance.
Development, on the other hand, focuses on the individual
teacher – on the process of reflection, examination,
and change which can lead to doing a better job and to personal
growth and professional growth. These two concepts assume
different views of teaching and the teacher. Training assumes
that teaching is a finite skill, one which can be acquired
and mastered. The teacher then learns to teach in the same
way s/he learned to tie shoes or to ride a bicycle. Development
assumes that teaching is a constantly evolving process of
growth and change. It is an expansion of skills and understanding,
one in which the teacher is responsible for the process in
much the same way students are for learning a language.
Teacher development is not seen as a one-off thing but a
continuous process. The teacher is engaged in exploring his
or her own teaching through reflective teaching in a collaborative
process together with learners and colleagues. Learning from
examining one’s own teaching, from carrying out classroom
research, from creating teaching portfolios, from interacting
with colleagues through critical friendships, mentoring and
participating in teacher networks, are all regarded as ways
in which teachers can acquire new skills and knowledge. This
reflects the prevailing educational philosophy of constructivism
which is currently popular in education including language
teacher education: knowledge is actively constructed and not
passively received. A constructive view of teaching involves
teachers in making their own sense of their own classrooms
and taking on the role of a reflective practitioner.
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