The problems with ESL if you want to actually speak English

Existing ESL Methods

English Out There

1.

Expensive, insufficient focused speaking practice and don’t scale

Massive increase in focused speaking practice for a lot less money and easily scales

In a conventional ESL classroom (which is how most of the world teaches) the ratio is 1 (teacher) to 30 (learners), at private schools it is between 1:6 and 1:15 and if you are very wealthy you can afford 1:1.  These set ups provide average focused speaking practice per learner from between 3.33% (1:30) to 50+% (1:1) per lesson.

The process produces a teacher/learner ratio that compares extremely favourably with that of the existing approaches, 5(+) (teachers) to 1 (learner). Per lesson it produces about 496.67% more of the right kind of data for the brain to improve its ability to speak the second language.

2.

Constrained by the classroom (bricks and mortar)

Completely flexible delivery - classroom, real world, blended or online

Classroom and teacher-centric delivery  of content or proprietory software packages that don’t facilitate real social engagement with the target language

PDFs and MP3s that prepare for and support real conversations using the target language. They work anywhere, face-to-face, mobile phones, Facebook, Google+, Skype, MSN, Moodle, virtual classrooms and even conventional classrooms

3.

Proven not to help learners to speak

Proven to help learners to speak

“In short, educational outcomes measured by way of dropout, failure, and low achievement on standardised tests all suggest that for some reason ESL learners do not benefit from ESL programming.” (Roessingh 2004)

The second language classroom, as it exists in most of the world, has a psychologically destructive impact on most second language learners. Socio-cultural differences around the world (in harness with the local educational culture) clearly illustrate this phenomenon. Countries with the biggest documented problems speaking English include South Korea, whose government has spent around $15 billion dollars trying to improve English speaking ability over the last 10 years using conventional ESL methods and importing native speaker teachers. Almost every observer acknowledges that this has failed to improve learner outcomes in South Korea.

This is reflected in the results I (and others) have achieved with randomly selected learners. Full sets of data, contemporaneous notes and ‘before and after’ audio comparisons can be found on my podcast page:

http://languagesoutthere.podomatic.com (scroll down to see all projects)

Basically it’s a bit like strapping a turbo onto natural language acquisition J

4.

Increases performance anxiety and lowers speaking confidence

Decreases performance anxiety and increases speaking confidence

When the optimal conditions for input, output and feedback are not present the natural process of language acquisition breaks down.

If you think about the environments in which learners are asked to practice the language they have been taught, i.e. with a teacher or classmate in front of their peers, it is easy to understand why people become nervous (add puberty and young adulthood into the equation and things get even trickier).

Nervousness and the fear of losing face are well documented causes of second language production pathology (Lathophobic Aphasia - Stevick 1976, Affective Filter - Krashen 1981, Performance v Arousal - Yerkes & Dodson 1908).

The key is to provide learners with sufficient focused input at an appropriate level to enable them to have a series of similar and largely comprehensible conversations with friendly English speakers; conversations that the learners themselves deem to have been successful. This builds confidence whilst simultaneously lowering anxiety. The outcome is dramatic improvement where previously acquired but unused language starts to be produced as speech.

The input is always at the learner’s speaking level and every lesson prepares them for a focused and interesting conversation with an English speaker. The conversation is possible because the learner is pre-prepared (and uses short-term memory and notes in combination with language stored in long-term memory) and they have a very good idea of what the other person’s responses will be. This gives them more control over the experience and serves to lower their level of anxiety.

Any misunderstandings are resolved through the gentle negotiation of meaning and produce ‘Aha!’ moments when everything comes together. This is a much more personal and emotional process than being corrected by a teacher or classmate in a classroom. It lays down many more cognitive markers; connections that enable learners to recall and use that language much more effectively in the future. The speakers’ shared responsibility for understanding builds a real social relationship. Increasingly we are coming to understand that our first languages were acquired socially (Kuhl & Gaxiola-Rivera 2010, Roy 2006).

5.

Is counter-intuitive to learning to speak

Replicates the way we learned our first language

This model, teacher-centric, teacher as provider of input and practice, is the global norm. The whole industry is built upon it. The classroom and the teacher’s role within it are what everything (methodology, content and interaction) is focused upon.

Computerised self-study and audio-lingual approaches provide a lot more data but it is not personally interesting to the learners’ brains, it has no deeper meaningful cognitive connection to their lives. Therefore it is not very memorable.

What the Communicative Method (conventional ESL), and computerised and audio-lingual approaches all lack (apart from sufficient personalised data) is careful transition from input to output followed by personalised feedback.

Our own investigations of the published times (on their websites) that other well known methods claim to be able to improve someone’s English speaking ability by three levels show a huge disparity between them and what we have been able to achieve using our approach.

http://englishoutthere.com/compare-courses

These differences, when set next to the relative amounts of useful data the learners’ brains receive using each method, seems to make very good sense.

Evolved from an idea to make lessons more interesting by teaching some language and then taking learners out of the classroom to put it into practice with fluent English speaking members of the public.

The process and the materials evolved from about 250,000 hours of teaching with multicultural learners. The teachers provided feedback from each lesson that went into the next version of the lesson, which was then taught again and adapted further the next time it was taught. After about seven years of doing this we tidied up the content and published it.

Recording these conversations (four or five per lesson with different people ideally with different accents) and then listening to them a few times substantially increases the quantity of personalised and level appropriate data for the brain. Helping it to notice patterns, sounds and meanings and then adjust, naturally, as we did when we learnt our first language.

By simply listening to the recordings of five speaking practice sessions for one lesson the learner doubles the amount of data the brain receives and can process. So one of our lessons produces a total of 993.34% more than a conventional ESL lesson.

6.

Has little extrinsic benefit

Has huge extrinsic benefit

Is a system that looks in and does not engage with the real world, the place where language is used. It has existed in the same format for many decades and is primarily teacher, print and classroom centric.

With the right support we could teach the world to speak English (or any other language) for next to nothing whilst connecting learners with grannies (‘Granny Cloud’ Sugata Mitra), students, the unemployed, prisoners and so on in mutually rewarding relationships.